Change WinXP Appearance Style (Noobie)

[bobn4burton]

Hi,

I'm new to AutoIT and am trying to get a handle on how it works. I've looked at the tutorials on the site and tried to search through the forums without too much luck.

What would be the best way to change WinXP Appearance and Color Scheme using AutoIT? I think I could cludge my way through using mouse click scripting...but I'm sure there is a much better/quicker way to accomplish this.

Would I want to do registry writes??

Anyways...any help would be greatly appreciated.

Oh...and I'd like to tie this Appearance change to a hotkey...

[torels]

in first place... go and take a look at C:\Windows\Resources\Themes... there are some dlls. Open them with Resource Hacker and take a look at them (and if you want create your own, replacing all items in the opened one)

Anyway... I was thinking of doing this too, And what I thought was to set all windows at $WS_POPUP style and set them as children windows of a window with a PNG background (obviously a little larger than the child)

But I failed in the $WS_POPUP part

If you can manage to get it working it would be great!

Cheers

[JSThePatriot]

bobn4burton,

I would like to point out that maybe you should show that you know how to use the Hotkey() function and then ask for more specific assistance. I would recommend looking at Control*() functions (ControlClick, ControlCommand, etc).

To help you a little on your journey, I will supply some code I recently needed to pull up the desktop properties dialog. The rest you will need to start working towards, and I may be able to assist further, but I am not going to supply a ton of code.

_OpenControlPanelItem("desk.cpl")

Func _OpenControlPanelItem($s_CPanelItem)
    ; TODO: Add error checking for object, and also for $s_CPanelItem
    Local $obj_Shell
    
    $obj_Shell = ObjCreate("Shell.Application")
    
    If IsObj($obj_Shell) Then
        $obj_Shell.ControlPanelItem($s_CPanelItem)
    Else
    EndIf
EndFunc

I hope this helps you on your journey,

Jarvis

[herewasplato]

... Would I want to do registry writes?? ...

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\Appearance

...

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

... and more

Getting the OS to use the changes that you have made to the registry is another matter. You might want to consider manually making the changes and then exporting that section of the registry to a reg file for later import.