Free styling tools for Windows 7?


Recommended Posts

Hi all! I came here because there are some things I do not like about Win 7 appearance. It is so weird - we can change border colors, wallpapers, and also the old appearance settings are available, but still there are so many things that cannot be customized - menus, folder actions - they stay always blue, that is so boring.

I have changed the logon screen already.

I have UxStyle_Core to enable custom themes.

Also there was one thing that annoyed me (attached picture): if I select some executable file then I see that old ugly icon in action bar - I drew red circle around it (is it left from windows 95 ?) even if executable has its own icon built in. I found a solution to replace that old icon with a better looking one in shell32.dl (marked green in picture):

post-324638-1263142174.png

and also this registry hack to replace unknown file type icon with more modern:

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/change-t...-windows-vista/

I would be grateful for suggestions of any good freeware resource editor which is stable and good for Windows 7. It seems that old TGTSoft StyleBuilder is now dead and no Windows 7 version. Can I still us the old StyleBuilder for new shellstyle.dll and msstyle files or it will screw them up? And what about Stardock skinstudio - does it work only for WndowBlinds?

Also I looked through many styles in devianart, but almost all of them included too much changes, I need just some minor changes (especially getting rid of that always blue menus, action bars and so on), so I guess I'll have to do it myself.

Now if only there were some tutorials, where to find resorces for each scrollbar, button, checkbox, menu for things that are different from windows xp...

Thanks a lot.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And what about Stardock skinstudio - does it work only for WndowBlinds?

Thanks a lot.

Yes, SkinStudio is for WindowBlinds, but I would check out WB7 as you can now "skin Aero", such as coloring and textures.

You can check out a visual walkthrough here.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.