Royale with Cheese
Although I use a different operating system in my personal life, I continue to use and enjoy Windows XP at work. Compared to past (or future) Windows operating systems, XP has been a remarkably stable and usable platform for me. And except for one thing, I don’t really have any significant complaints. Unfortunately, that one thing is the default base Luna interface theme. It’s the blue. I don’t care for that strange blue color. For the first few years I used XP I avoided the strange blue by sticking with the Classic style. And that felt pretty good. But over time I migrated to the more cartoonish default. And I kept on hating the blue.
Using a theme hack, I’ve tried a number of user authored styles over the years, but most of those felt poorly put together or were just plain ugly. The first viable option I encountered was when Microsoft released another official theme called Royale/Energy Blue. Royale was different from Luna in a number of ways, but most importantly in that it employed a subtle metallic blue instead of the bright (hated) blue in Luna. But that didn’t quite work for me either because the one thing I liked about Luna was the beige object color that Royale replaced with a dull grey. So I alternated between the two styles, never really pleased with either.
That is until I started playing around with a resource hacker and created my own hybrid theme that I’ve deemed RoyaLuna. So yeah, I’m not going to win any awards for naming things, but my parents named me Greg, so it’s obviously hereditary.
RoyaLuna is a pretty simple style. I’ve basically taken Luna and replaced the horrible blue with the Royale blue. This change includes the taskbar, system tray, start menu, title bars, scroll bars, and a few other objects. But in a very nice way. And with the Luna beige.
And so, to make a long story only a bit longer, I’m offering up this theme for anyone else that might like working in a normal XP environment, sans the horrible Luna blue. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Follow these 3 steps to use RoyaLuna on your machine:
- First, download, extract, and run the UX Theme Multi-Patcher. Accept the prompts, and DO NOT let the system revert back to the files that you are replacing. Reboot.
- After that is complete, download and extract the theme file and save it to: C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes
- Double-click the file you just put in your Themes directory to bring up Display Properties and select RoyaLuna.
And that’s it. This process won’t alter any of your normal themes or prevent you from going back to them if you don’t like RoyaLuna. For the image inclined, this is how my desktop looks using the RoyaLuna theme.
To make things go smoother while following the instructions above, listen to this song and pretend to be a badass.
Peace & Love.
