Wish you were here

I soon found out that when it comes to creating a theme, you can do as much or as little as you like. I could change any part of a theme—until it looked and sounded just the way I wanted. I could also use my own pictures for the desktop background and screen saver, and even create custom window border colors. I've always liked to change things around on my desktop, so I had a lot of fun trying out different combinations of pictures, colors, and sounds.

To learn more about making your own themes, see Create a theme.

Say it with a slide show

My favorite thing about themes is that you aren't confined to a single desktop background—you can have a slide show of pictures. Most of the Aero themes include a desktop background slide show, or you can use your own photos, like I did.

In Personalization in Control Panel, I clicked Desktop Background and browsed to the folder where my latest batch of vacation photos was stored. I didn't want to use all of the pictures in the folder in my slide show (some of the photos featuring me with a sunburn weren't exactly flattering), so I cleared the check box for each picture I wanted to remove. Just like that, all of the unflattering photos were left out of the slide show—no deleting, transferring, or heavy lifting required.

Clear the check box to remove a picture from the slide show.

You can also choose how often the slide show changes pictures, whether to shuffle the images in a random order, and how the pictures are positioned on your desktop. Positioning is especially helpful for photos—a couple of pictures were looking a little distorted on my desktop (and I was pretty sure it wasn't because of camera operator error), so I changed the picture position until they looked right. And voilà, no more fuzzy photos.

For more information, see Create a desktop background slide show.

Whenever you make changes to a theme, your new settings appear under My Themes as an unsaved theme.

An unsaved theme

Once I was happy with the photos, colors, and sounds in my theme, I saved those settings so I could come back to the theme whenever I wanted.

Finally, I was ready to try sharing my brand-new vacation theme with my friends. To send a theme to other people, you need to save it in a format that can be shared—a .themepack file. To create a .themepack file for my theme, I right-clicked its icon and clicked Save theme for sharing.

Right-click a theme to save it for sharing.

You can find your .themepack file in your My Documents folder. Once you save your theme as a .themepack file, you can share it in e‑mail, through a network, or onto an external hard disk.

A .themepack file

I like to share themes in e‑mail so I can send a theme to several people at once. All I have to do is attach the .themepack file to my e‑mail message. For more information about attaching files, see Getting started with e-mail.

Note

If you're sending your theme in e‑mail, be careful how many photos you use in your desktop background slide show. Using lots of photos can make the .themepack file really big, and some e‑mail programs might have attachment size limits.

Then when my friends get my e‑mail, all they have to do is double-click the .themepack file to apply my theme to their desktops. It's saved automatically under My Themes in Personalization in Control Panel so they can use it as often as they like.

You don't have to stop at just one—you can create as many themes as you want, and you can find even more available for download on the Windows website. My friends and I are having a lot of fun exchanging themes featuring everything from our vacation photos to birthday parties, pets, and favorite movies and TV shows. I think you'll find that once you give themes a try, you'll never go back to the same old desktop.