Windows 7 has many beautiful built-in themes to enhance the look of your desktop. You can always right-click on the desktop and then select “Personalize” to view and apply them.
There are multiple theme categories like Architecture, Characters, Nature, Landscapes along with regional themes. The regional theme is determined by your answer in the first step of installing Windows 7.
As you can see, I selected “English (US)” during the setup and so I was offered location-specific topics from the US.
Similarly, Windows 7 also offers several other themes for different regions such as Australia, Canada, UK, USA and South Africa. However, these are hidden by default and only your region-specific theme will be made available to you.
Why does Windows 7 hide these extra themes from us? I don’t know, but we can always unlock these hidden themes and use them. This is what I will talk about in this article.
Here are the steps.
Open Windows Explorer, go to “Organize -> Folder and search options” on the top menu bar.
Switch to the “View” tab, select “Show hidden files, folders, or drives” and then uncheck the box named “Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)”. Click OK.
You can now navigate to the path C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT. You will see 5 subfolders named MCT-AU, MCT-CA, MCT-GB, MCT-US and MCT-ZA, representing Australia, Canada, UK, USA and South Africa respectively.
Each directory can include subdirectories with theme names, country names, rss feeds, and websites, all of which are specific to that country. Let’s focus on the first two folders.
The country-specifically named folder contains the respective theme’s wallpapers; All wallpapers included are in high resolution (1920×1200). The Themes folder provides related topics that you can use.
You can now double-click the theme file to add it to the Personalization widget in Control Panel, or just use the included wallpapers as your desktop background. Simple and easy.
Hack the registry
Another way to achieve the goal is to use a Registry Hack (make sure you back up the registry before proceeding). Copy and paste the following text into notepad:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Themes\InstalledThemes\MCT] “%windir%\\Globalization\\MCT\\MCT-AU\\Theme\\AU.theme”=”” “%windir%\\Globalization\\MCT\\MCT-CA\\Theme\\CA.theme”=”” “%windir%\\Globalization\\MCT\\MCT-GB\\Theme\”\”\GB\theme”=% \\US.theme”=”” “%windir%\\Globalization\\MCT\\MCT-ZA\\Theme\\ZA.theme”=””
Now, click “File -> Save As” on the top menu bar, select “Save As” to “All files”, then name the file with the reg extension, for example, themes.reg.
Double click on the saved registry file, confirm the dialog pops up and you’re done. You can now see those additional hidden themes in the Personalization window.
Get Windows 7 desktop theme online
Microsoft also offers some cool Windows 7 Desktop Wallpapers and Themes at the Windows 7 Library. You might want to use some of them.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
