Window XP Tweak, Advanced XP

Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows XP, has made a lot of changes to the way Windows looks and behaves. The Start Menu is green and has a new, two-column layout; the taskbar and program titles are huge and bright blue. Many have accused Microsoft of making a ‘play-school’ operating system, in the mistaken belief that their users are “slow” and like pretty colors more than usability. A window XP tweak can fix most of that.

Lots of people preferred the basic, subdued, more serious look of Windows 2000. Things were square and grey, but much faster and less garish. Luckily, Microsoft has included an easy window XP tweak to set XP to look exactly like Windows 2000 used to.

First, find a blank section of your desktop and right-click it. Choose Properties from the menu that appears. The Themes options should appear. Click in the drop-down menu that currently says ‘Windows XP’, and choose ‘Windows Classic’ instead.

However, this doesn’t change the layout of the Start menu back to what you’ll be used to – it still has two columns instead of one, and remembers recently used programs instead of listing what you tell it to. There’s different XP tweaks that allows you to change this behaviour. Just right-click a blank space in the taskbar, choose Properties, go to the Start Menu tab and click in the ‘Classic Start Menu’ box. Now just click OK and you’re good to go!

There a several software programs out on the market that will do a window XP tweak for speed settings also and lots of other customizing options.