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Visual Styles on Windows 10


Jody Thornton

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Setting up a Windows 10 box on LTSC 2019.  I have found a couple of Aero Windows 7-esque styles that apply.  However, I was looking for more of them.  My old mainstay, DeviantArt, doesn't seem to have the themes and visual styles that they once did.  Is there still a place to find several visual styles that I can apply to Windows 10?

I have all of the unsigned theme issues taken care of.  I just can't find many themes.

 

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I've had the impression over the years that there's less interest for theme making. I guess frequent updates could be a discouraging factor. Interestingly, using Win11 RTM based visual style file doesn't seem to be causing apparent issues on Win10 versions down to 1809.

Edit: I forgot, there is another forum focused on such themes - Virtual Customs, maybe you can dig up something there.

Edited by UCyborg
Didn't get it right the first time.
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Well, even though I tried a few nice ones like "Aero Frost" and "Glow", I settled on just colourizing the title bars for some sort of windowed effect.  It looks reasonably nice.

I must say, while it's nice to have a Windows 10 LTSC installation I can somewhat enjoy using, I still prefer Windows 8.  I just realized that when you remove components form Add/Remove Components, you CANNOT delete the payload in DISM - the way you can on Windows 8x.  I'm going to try and get another year out of Windows 8 first, and then migrate to Windows 10, using this LTSV box then.

 

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@vinifera @UCyborg @Jody Thornton
take a look at my customized LTSB 2015 for a low profile fanless laptop with NVME ssd. I used files from windows 8.1 and windows beta 10.0.9888 (First beta with w10.0 kernel version & last beta with w8.1 theme style in taskbar & windows):

uxtheme uxinit themeui shellstyle from 9888
& windows 8.1 theme folder c:\windows\resources\themes

Only StartIsBack is used for the taskbar. 

Yes, processes and threads tweaked by me. Also take a look at the explorer without ribbon and explorer navigation arrows and icons... (imageres.dll from 8.1)

caption buttons can be tweaked to make it look smaller like windows 8.1, titlebar font is the same as 8.1

button and dialog style can be changed too to be more like 8.1 but wasn't done in the screenshot. (you can see inactive window black border... w10 dwm? )

No patches. All files are MS original from other builds:
 

laptop.png

Edited by sonyu
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Very impressive!

I was able to tweak my LTSB down to 29 processes and 290 threads.
It's been a while since doing my tweaks but I seem to recall that the "default install" had somewhere between 48 and 60 processes!
Don't recall the exact number, but it was a far cry from only 29  :cheerleader:

image.thumb.png.16b88c2e0f2107bc2f701c50bce0a739.png

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why s

7 hours ago, sonyu said:

@vinifera @UCyborg @Jody Thornton
take a look at my customized LTSB 2015 for a low profile fanless laptop with NVME ssd. I used files from windows 8.1 and windows beta 10.0.9888 (First beta with w10.0 kernel version & last beta with w8.1 theme style in taskbar & windows):

 

why should i care ?

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12 hours ago, sonyu said:

@vinifera @UCyborg @Jody Thornton
take a look at my customized LTSB 2015 for a low profile fanless laptop with NVME ssd. I used files from windows 8.1 and windows beta 10.0.9888 (First beta with w10.0 kernel version & last beta with w8.1 theme style in taskbar & windows):

uxtheme uxinit themeui shellstyle from 9888
& windows 8.1 theme folder c:\windows\resources\themes

Only StartIsBack is used for the taskbar. 

Yes, processes and threads tweaked by me. Also take a look at the explorer without ribbon and explorer navigation arrows and icons... (imageres.dll from 8.1)

caption buttons can be tweaked to make it look smaller like windows 8.1, titlebar font is the same as 8.1

button and dialog style can be changed too to be more like 8.1 but wasn't done in the screenshot. (you can see inactive window black border... w10 dwm? )

No patches. All files are MS original from other builds:
 

laptop.png

That's completely impressive!

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You don't know what a person might be going through. You don't know what he can bring you or how he can inspire you. I always prefer to be kind and polite.

When I want to hear something unpleasant I turn on the news.

 

After all these years since w10 release, I have been testing and tweaking it trying to get it as fast as w8.1 on the same hardware and noticed what really makes it better in memory usage and laggy in general use (ui lag). 

I searched for tweaks year by year... and I can say the os CAN be faster than w8.1. I even know at which beta build the os makes a difference in terms of slowness compared to early builds and 8.1 but I don't want to go offtopic here.

Just remember how fast 98 and 2000 (even XP) were on normal hardware and you will understand how losing cpu cycles has been normalized these days. Don't believe me? You still think w10 it's "always" faster? Ok, just take a look at Windows 7 market share percentage and ask yourself why people is still interested in an "old" OS.

MS optimizes the kernel/OS as much as they can so that Telemetry and Metro running in the background does not penalize the general system peformance (that's why they recommend you a list of the minimum required cpus to run it) but once you get rid of these and other things you have an OS faster than w8.1... cause you won't release an os slower than its predecessor, right?

Do you still don't believe it?

I'll maybe release a software someday to really optimize windows considering all these tweaks here and there... it's really a different OS once you heavy tweak it.

Well, sorry for going offtopic and thanks to everyone who liked my customized w10 with w8 theme.

Edit: Anyway I'll always love Windows 8.0, but I can't completely ignore Windows 10 when Intel isn't releasing iGPU drivers to run w7,w8 on new hardware... 

 

Edited by sonyu
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I still fancy Aero era aesthetics, so my system looks similar to this. Precisely, most GUI controls use images exported from Win7's default Aero theme (so have rounded buttons among other things), but I use square window caption buttons, using an image that someone posted few years back in Aero Glass subforum. I think DWM expects those to be certain size. I remember sagorpirbd's theme also using a huge image for window borders, which technically isn't required, so I replaced it with a smaller one from another theme that has square (non-rounded) window borders. It's needed to have that white line around.

It's a lot of clicking to replace all the images, and to make the whole thing proper, a number of images would have to be redrawn in a bigger size to properly support higher DPI settings that Win10 supports, but not Win7. Not good with drawing. I managed to do few simple ones like some arrows, which is just some lines. I resized the rest with an algorithm in Paint.NET (or was it GIMP, I know I toyed with both) and didn't dare to look how it actually looks in practice, it introduces blurring, so quite unprofessional.

The linked themes from sagorpirbd's are for older Win10 builds and glitchy on newer ones as Windows' msstyles files weren't designed to be an universal format, for that, I presume a dedicated skinning application would be required. I guess it can be OK if you don't upgrade OS often and can live with some limitations that come with editing msstyles.

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