Where to Find the Themes
First, open the Personalization Control Panel, by right clicking on the desktop and choose Personalize.
Now you will see a window with 3 panels:
- My Themes - contains the themes created or modified by you.
- Aero Themes - contains the Windows 7 predefined Aero themes, which are also the default themes.
- Basic and High Contrast Themes - a set of themes which do not contain the Aero specific features. They are similar to themes from Windows XP or Windows 2000 when it comes to looks.
Extra Features of Aero Themes
Windows Aero is about improving appearance, aesthetics and efficiency in the user interface. The most evident difference between the basic themes and the Aero ones is the transparency of the windows.
Other interesting differentiating elements are thumbnail previews of the applications and some extra features available when working with the taskbar: Aero Peek, overlay icons and progress bars, grouped thumbnails, etc. These are all presented in detail in one of our previous articles, called New Features & Improvements in the Windows 7 Taskbar.
What Can Be Personalized
There are 4 features of a theme that can be personalized and they are all found at the bottom of the Personalization window: the desktop background, which we covered in detail in our guide called How to Customize your Desktop Background, the window color, sounds scheme and screen saver.
How to Set the Theme's Window Color
To set the window color used by your current theme, click on the 'Window Color' button that can be found on lower part of the Personalization window.
There is a default color for each theme, which is shown in the 'Current color' field highlighted in the screenshot below.
You can change this color at any time by selecting from any of the preset colors. Also, you can enable or disable the transparency of windows by clicking on the 'Enable transparency' check-box.
You can change the color intensity by just moving the scroll in the 'Color intensity' bar.
You can also create your own color by clicking 'Show color mixer' under the color intensity bar.
The color mixer allows you to choose the value for three color properties:
- Hue - is the property of colors by which they can be perceived as ranging from red through yellow, green, and blue.
- Saturation - is the vividness of a color's hue. Saturation measures the degree to which a color differs from a gray of the same darkness or lightness. The saturation of a color is determined by a combination of light intensity and how much it is distributed across the spectrum of different wavelengths. The purest color is achieved by using just one wavelength at a high intensity, such as in laser light. If the intensity drops, so does the saturation.
- Brightness - can be defined as the visual effect of illumination on objects.
Play a bit with these three properties to see what colors you get.
You can set more advanced aspects of the windows by clicking on the 'Advance appearance settings' link at the bottom of the window.
In the 'Window Color and Appearance' window you have a deeper selection of colors and fonts, for items like Active Title Bar, Active Window Border, Border Padding, Desktop, Disabled Item, Hyperlink, Pallet Title and others.
From here you can choose the size, the color, the font with its specific size, color, bold or italic.
NOTE: For some items you can select only the size, for others the size and the font, because not all have these features.
When done, click OK to keep the changes you made, Cancel to revoke all the settings that you have just done, or Apply to see how different changes that you have done really look on your computer without closing the configuration windows.
How to Change the Theme's Sounds Scheme
To edit the sounds scheme, in the Personalization window, click on the Sounds option, found on the bottom.
The Sound window will appear. Make sure you stay in the Sounds tab. Here you can set different things concerning the sounds played during your computing experience with the currently selected theme.
The set of sounds for different events in Windows is called a sound scheme. Click on the 'Sound Scheme' drop-down list, so you can see all the available schemes.
NOTE: If you don't want to use a sound scheme, then select 'No Sounds' from the drop-down list. This will change your current theme so that it doesn't play any sounds while you are using your PC.
You can choose to either select an existing scheme or to modify a pre-existing one so your computer would sound just as you want. You have several schemes from which you can choose. Each of them has a different sound for different program event. Select different schemes and different events and press the Test button so you can listen to them.
You can select a program event and then a different sound for it, from the Sounds drop-down list.
Or, you can select your own sound, by clicking the Browse button, found on the right of the Test button.
NOTE: You can only set WAV files as Windows 7 sounds. Other formats are not supported.
If you decide to create your own sound scheme, after making all the settings you want, don't forget to save it by pressing the 'Save As' button.
You are now asked to choose a name for your sound scheme. Type it and press the OK button.
You can always delete the schemes that you created by selecting them and pressing the Delete button.
Press the OK button to use the scheme you selected, or on Cancel button to revoke the change.
How to Set the Theme's Screen Saver
All default Aero themes from Windows 7 have no screen saver set. You can change this by clicking on the 'Screen Saver' link, in the Personalization window.
The screen saver settings window will now open.
Click on the 'Screen saver' drop-down list, to see all the available screen savers.
You can select one of them and see the preview either on the small screen from the 'Screen Saver Settings' window, or your desktop, by clicking the Preview button. When you do this, make sure you don't use your mouse or keyboard or the screensaver preview will get turned off immediately.
Then, you can also change different options, by clicking on the Settings button.
The settings window is different from screensaver to screensaver and it allows you to configure only the items which are editable. Once you've changed the parameters you desire, click on OK.
You can set the number of minutes after which the screen saver will start by typing it in the Wait field.
Also, you can set whether to display or not, on resume, the logon screen. This means that, each time the screen saver starts, when you want to go back to your desktop, you will have to type your user password again. This options locks your PC when the screensaver is started and can be useful if you don't want other people to access your user account while you are away from your PC.
When done, click OK or Apply to keep the changes you made and Cancel to revoke them.
How to Save or Delete Your Themes
After you have finished configuring a theme, don't forget to save it by clicking on the 'Save theme' option, in the Personalization window.
If you want to delete a theme, you should keep in mind that you cannot delete an active theme. Therefore you have to apply another theme, then right click on the one you want to delete, and select 'Delete Theme'.
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