After making your Vista into Windows 7 & XP into Vista, I had a little moment of nostalgia when I decided to install Windows 98 on Windows 7 via Virtual PC. It wasn’t exactly as easy as I thought, creating a bootable CD of Windows 98 on Windows 7 on a machine with no floppy drive was pretty geeky. Anyhoo … I got it done & listening to the welcome sound of Windows 98 brought back old memories, rebooting after installing every driver reminded me of what all we used to do back in the days. Life’s much simple now, Vista made it so, Windows 7 takes it further, which brings me to themes in Windows 7. After a long time Microsoft allows us to package Sounds, Icons, Wallpapers & Colors with ease & share them around. So I thought why not bring back those good ‘ol themes of Windows 98 on 7. Here are 4 ready made packages & resources for all 16 themes that were bundled with Windows 98.
The themes contain:
- Wallpaper
- Mouse pointers
- Desktop icons
- Sounds
- Color scheme
To install just double click on the file. The 4 packaged themes:
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Click on the theme to download.
Download resources for all 16 themes:
Mirror links: Baseball, Jungle, Mystery, Travel
UPDATE: Free beer for Madata© for creating install packages for the rest of the themes!
If however you find that the cursors or the sound scheme is too noobish then you can choose the default schemes from the respective control panels:
Control Panel –> Appearance and Personalization –> Personalization will bring this screen:
| For Cursor: | For Sound: |
| Select Change mouse pointers from the left sidebar & select the Windows Aero (system scheme) | Select Sounds from the bottom options & select the Windows Default scheme. |
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To change the icons:
Select Change desktop icons from the left sidebar:
NOTE: You can also disable the themes changing your Icons & Cursors by un-checking the “Allow themes to change …” in both windows as highlighted.
Update: TimTusk has been kind enough to extract the Screensavers and they are available for download. To use them you need to copy the files to:
- C:\Windows\System32 in case you’re using 32- bit Windows.
- C:\Windows\SysWOW64 – in case you have a 64-bit Windows installation.
Mirror by DZ
~Enjoy