Is there a way to change the color of this?

Is there a way to change the background color of these kind of windows and open/save dialogue to something a little darker than white?

thanks. I know about deviant art and all that but as I recall messing around with Win7 when it first came out you had to use the CLASSIC theme to change any of the ctrl panel windows and open/save dialogues, this is no longer the case? thanks

Cool thanks. Well here's my question now. How come when I'm using the basic Win 7 theme and go into personalize -> window color -> advanced settings -> Window color and change it to a light grey and hit apply it does not affect the open/save dialogue or system windows I mentioned?
Is there some other hidden setting these themers know? thanks

Or you could learn to do it yourself :)

There are several options available to you :

1.
As stated above, apply a custom theme.

Advantage : little work. Disadvantage : could be that not everything in the style will be to your liking/you won't learn anything.

2.
Do some hex-editing to change the background of explorer. Just read this thread on sevenforums and it will guide you through it. Very nice effort by the OP in that thread btw.
Or another way, by use of nothing else then your .theme file and notepad :

1.Make sure the right aerotheme is saved and active (personalization page).

2. Open C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\[themename].theme in notepad.
3. Scroll to the bottom where there should be a section called [Control Panel\Colors].
4. Modify the Window=255 255 255 line to whatever colour you want (the values are red green blue (RGB) from 0 to 255. 200 200 200 will be gray for example. You can look up a list of values through google.

It's only explorerbackground though, not the dialog boxes.

For that you should use a thirdparty app, like VSB (Vista Style Builder) or Windowblinds.
And so we get at the third option :

3. Use VSB. This app is not free though, and they don't provide any demo at all, but it's well worth it's money. It costs only $22 (€16), and allthough it seems a hard peace of software to learn at first, it's actually relatively easy to learn once you're used to how it works. You can get it here if you should consider buying it. They also have a great forum through which literally allmost any resource can be found. It's a must to use the forums when starting to use it. It'll make the learningprocess easier and your understanding of how it works will expand faster. With this app you could change virtually anything you want in the visual style

4. Use Windowblinds. Also very good software. You can download a demo, but if you want full functionality, you'd have to pay for it to be legit. You could find a few good guides through google, but here's one I find very usefull: link

5. Use restorator to change whatever resources you'd want, but it'll require a little expertize. But if you google "Win7 resource mods" or something like that, you will find quite a few guides and instructions to get you started on how it works. Anyone could learn with not too much effort.

It's up to you, but if you like to learn stuff, you should check it all out.
It's well worth it.

Hope this helped you a bit.

TheBunny









For the dialog boxes

That was very detailed and helpful. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.

bounce said:

That was very detailed and helpful. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.

You're welcome.