How to Make Windows Vista Look Like XP

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews, today I'm going to show you how to make Windows Vista look like Microsoft XP. I'm going to do this in two ways, we're going to disable Aero we're going to change it to the Windows classic view, and I'm going to change the start menu to look like it did in XP. Let's go to the computer. The very first thing I'm going to do is disable Windows Aero. Windows Aero is something Microsoft added in Vista to add a little touch of flair to the Windows animations and the look of the Windows. To disable it, right click on your desktop and select personalize. We're going to choose the very top one, Windows color and appearance. Down here at the very bottom is a little link that says open classic appearance properties for more color options. Let's select that. And in this dialogue that just popped up we're going to change the color scheme to Windows classic. Select that and press apply. Now this gives your Windows a look that's much more along the lines of how Microsoft Windows XP looked. The next step that we're going to do is change the start menu. If I click on start, this is the Microsoft Vista start menu that was changed between XP and Vista to a different format. We're going to change that back to the XP format. To do so, right click on start, and click properties. What we're going to select here is the classic start menu and press apply. Now if I click on the start menu, you can see it looks a lot more like the Windows XP start menu with the run option, the help, and the shut down down here at the bottom, as well as your programs, files looking a lot more like it did with Windows XP. To change everything back, just select the new start menu again and press apply, we just changed our start menu to the Vista start menu, and let's reenable Windows Aero and click apply. And we're now back to the Vista look. It should be noted that by changing the Windows classic you're going to greatly increase the performance of your Windows if it seems to be a tad sluggish in changing Windows and minimizing applications. That can be a very effective tool to speed up your computer. My name is Dave Andrews, and I've just showed you how to make Windows Vista look like Microsoft Windows XP."