Hands on: Third-party themes

It’s long been a standing joke in Windows XP that the ‘More themes online…’ item in the Display Properties Themes list doesn’t lead anywhere useful.

In earlier days, it led to an advert for Windows Plus, but now the link leads to a page stating that Plus has been discontinued and that “Many of the features and tools that have been enjoyed for years now can be found in new Microsoft titles and services including Windows Vista”.

Although there are plenty of third-party themes available, these involve installing further software, such as Window Blinds and/or hacking various system files. Apart from a rather unsatisfactory port of the Media Edition Royale Theme, XP users have been limited to the XP theme, available in garish blue, gruesome olive or ghostly grey.

However, Microsoft has now released a Zune theme for XP. If that download doesn’t work, a web search for ‘XP Zune theme’ should deliver.

It comes with a charcoal Taskbar, window titles and frames, an orange start button and wallpaper showing an enthusiastic crowd at what seems to be a music festival - or possibly a personal appearance by Steve Ballmer. You can, of course, change the wallpaper to suit while keeping the rest of the theme.

Reliability
The Windows Performance Monitor has been around since NT days, but it’s fairly arcane. XP’s Performance Monitor shows, by default, a graph of memory pages per second, disk queue length and percentage of processor time, which isn’t a lot of use to end users.

However, you can add other counters, such as Page File usage or TCP segments received. Vista’s is a much more splendid affair and incorporates a Reliability Meter. To save yourself a long trek through Control Panel, System and Maintenance, type ‘perfmon’ into the Find or Run box.