I've been running the Windows 7 beta for awhile now, and I'm in love! If you're relatively technical and want to take the new OS for a spin, the good news is that we've extended the beta download period until February 10, 2009. Once you have it installed, it's worth reading Tim Sneath's fantastic list of 30 Windows 7 secrets. I'm running Windows 7 on my Dell XPS desktop machine at home and on my Dell laptop at work. Even with the beta version, everything runs very smoothly and I feel a lot more productive. Plus, it's just a joy to use.
Windows 7 introduces theme packs, which are .cab files that contain all of the necessary assets to implement a theme, including sound files and images. You can find a bunch of theme packs on the Windows 7 site, and Paul Thurrott covers the basics and includes his own theme packs in his article, Windows 7 Feature Focus: Styles and Desktop Slide Shows.
As an experiment, I've created a theme pack based on my wallpaper images. It contains 20 hand-picked, nature-themed macro photos that I've taken over the years. The desktop images are configured to shuffle randomly every 30 minutes. Otherwise, the theme uses the default Windows 7 color and sound schemes.
As always, comments and feedback are welcome. Drop me a note if you decide to create your own.
Update on 2/24/2010: If you (or your browser) renames the file during download, it may not be recognized by Windows 7. Simply rename the downloaded file so that it ends with ".themepack", then double-click to install.
This should be standard on every PC. It's now a standard on my desktop, at least. Fantastic photography, Mike.
Just wanted to take a moment to highlight Mike Swanson’s amazing theme pack for Windows 7. Mike is a
Thanks, Tim! I appreciate the kind words.
Wow! these are amazing shots Mike,
Really shows off the way the Superbar picks up the underlying colors as well
Thanks :)
Will you be taking your camera to MIX for a Macro view of the conversation?
Hopefully by now you have Windows 7 beta 1 running on some machine and you have spotted Themes. Themes
Hopefully by now you have Windows 7 beta 1 running on one or more machines and you'll have spotted Themes.
Thanks Mike absolutely stunning pics, they should be a part of the final Win 7 release. Please make it so.
Mike, I'm downloading them now, they look great. One tiny suggestion, would you be able to mention the size of the imagees, I'm needing to download before I can figure out whether they'll work on my 1920x1200 display.
Thanks!
Great question, Harry. All of the images in this theme pack are 1920 x 1200, so you should be okay.
As mentioned in a recent post about My Windows 7 Theme Pack , I’ve been running Beta 1 (build 7000) for
Inspired by Mike Swanson’s post of his fantastic Windows 7 Theme Pack from a selection of his wallpaper images and the already available Windows 7 Theme packs I have jumped aboard and gone a step further than Long Zheng’s post...
This is fantastic. Thanks, Mike. How about "Dreamscene" for Win 7?
Great theme. I love it. Thank you!
Back in 2006 I paved (or "formatted", or "torched", or "gave " a technical