Make Windows XP look like Windows 98/NT4 August 30, 2006: Here is the LAST update I have made to the XP Classic Pack. Due to the fact that I don't use Windows anymore I am not interested in maintaining this little project of mine. This last package, Classic Pack XP 1.5 (W98 flavor), should be quite enough to REALLY make your XP look like Windows 98. The info below is outdated, I am leaving it here for you to enjoy. The links are still active, however. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Windows XP Classic Pack 1.4 (NT4 flavor) is ready! Sorry about not taking time to make an installer for it. It is planned for near future versions. Most files can be copied from within Windows, and about ten will require the Recovery Console/MS-DOS. README.TXT *** Windows XP Classic Pack 1.4 (files and registry settings only) *** THIS PACK IS FOR WINDOWS XP HOME/PROFESSIONAL ENGLISH EDITION ONLY! INSTALLING IT ON ANY OTHER WINDOWS VERSIONS OR OTHER LANGUAGES WILL SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR SYSTEM! IF YOU ARE NOT USING WINDOWS XP NOW, ABORT THE INSTALLATION IMMEDIATELY! This pack is freeware and you agree to use it with no warranty whatsoever. The author bears no responsibility for any damage to your software or hardware. FEATURES - Change: Genuine Windows NT 4.0 icons, bitmaps, and names for your Desktop, Start Menu, files and folders, Control Panel applets, and other shell resources - Change: Taskbar Properties dialog's traditional, "sleek" interface - Change: progman.exe (Windows 3.11 Program Manager which is still present in Windows XP) replaced with the NT 4.0 version of it because the XP one does not seem to work correctly - Added: Windows NT theme - Added: Desktop Themes control panel applet + Windows 9x Themes installer "Plus98XP.exe" - Added: Console Control Panel applet like in Windows NT 4.0 - Added: Windows File Manager winfile.exe utility (removed by Microsoft beginning with Windows 2000 but works perfectly in Windows 2000 and Windows XP) - Added: Regedt32.exe registry editor (in Windows XP, the file "regedt32.exe" in the System32 folder is just a launcher of Regedit.exe because Microsoft has merged all regedt32 features into regedit.exe, though it turns out not all of them. This file taken from Windows 2000 distribution is the real Regedt32 editor, and it works well on Windows XP. - Added: srvmgr.cpl NT 4.0 control panel CPL which includes the applets Devices, Server, and Services. You might want to hide Devices and Server ones as the first one just doubles Add Hardware applet and the other does not look useful for a home PC. - Added: Microsoft Clock from Windows NT 4.0. It was last present in Windows 3.11 and Windows NT 4.0. You now get it back for fun, and it works! - Added: Windows NT 4.0 User Manager. Works in Windows XP. INSTRUCTION It is highly recommended that you do this prior to installing the pack: RUN "BAT\BACKUP.BAT" TO BACK UP ALL FILES THAT ARE SUPPOSED TO BE REPLACED! They will be saved in %windir%\SYSBCKUP. Should anything go wrong, you can always restore the original files from the Recovery Console. Choose "Windows Classic" theme in Control Panel - Display - Themes Stop and disable the Themes service Choose "Adjust to Best Performance" in Control Panel - System - Advanced - Performance Apply the registry settings after you have installed the classic pack files FILELIST.TXT \bat\backup.bat Back up the files that need to be replaced by the current pack \bat\sfcprev.bat Prevent System File Checker from filling the DLL cache \bat\wininst.bat Invokes the Windows XP Setup dialog \files Windows XP Classic Pack files \optional Optional replacement files \reg\all_reg.reg Common classic interface registry settings \reg\cpuser2.reg Classic Users control panel applet \reg\logonwallpaper.reg Windows NT 4 logon picture \Plus98XP.exe Windows 9x themes installer \readme.txt Readme file \filelist.txt This file All changes must be made under an administrative account! Warming Up * Junk XP themes! First enable the Classic theme in your Display properties. You could actually prevent the XP themes from being turned on at all by disabling the Themes service: Start - Run, services.msc, open the Themes service, stop it, and set it to Disabled. From now on, you won't see the XP theme option in your Display properties window, just like in Windows Server 2003. However, you might not like the fact that the accounts where the Classic theme was not set before the Themes service was disabled (that includes the logon screen, too) would all have the windows and buttons sizes corresponding to the XP themes, i.e. thick and huge, but this time without bold colors. While you could always apply the Classic theme as another user, the logon screen is harder to manage. Microsoft's free utility called Tweak UI for Windows XP will do it for you (Logon section). Download TweakUI for Windows XP http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/c/a/fca6767b-9ed9-45a6-b352-839afb2a2679/TweakUiPowertoySetup.exe * Farewell to the Welcome Screen! Get rid of the Welcome screen if you don't use the Fast User Switching capability: Control Panel - User Accounts - Change the way users log on and off - uncheck both). You will get the classic Win2K logon prompt. * Classic Start Menu. Return the classic Start Menu of the previous versions: Control Panel - Taskbar and Start Menu - Start Menu - Classic Start Menu radio button. There is more in Customize: you could, for example, turn off Personalized menus (items hiding themselves when unused for a long time), just like in Windows 98/NT4. You might also want to get rid of grouping taskbar buttons and hiding inactive tray icons there to resemble classic Windows even more, but I personally find these to be quite useful, unlike themes. * Good Old Green Desktop. In Display Properties - Appearance, select Windows Classic color scheme. Then press Advanced, and change the Desktop color to classic green (RGB 0 128 128). * No Bells, No Whistles. Control Panel - System (or just Start+Pause/Break on the keyboard) - Advanced - Performance Settings - Adjust For Best Performance. This will eliminate XP's bells and whistles such as the mouse cursor shadow, menu shadows, fading/sliding menus, window animations, etc. (though you might want to keep sliding menus, like in 98, then you can always set in in Display - Appearance - Effects). * Windows Explorer. Control Panel - Folder Options, or any Explorer window - Tools - Folder Options. On the General tab, check Use Windows Classic Folders, Open Each Folder In The Same Window, Double-Click To Open An Item. On the second View tab, leave only ##2, 3, 4, 5 checked under Files and Folders -- that is, Display File Size Info, Display Simple Folder View, Display Contents of System Folders, Display Full Path in Address Bar. Under Hidden Files & Folders, choose Show Hidden Files and Folders. Check Show Control Panel in My Computer, all other boxes under "Hide Extensions..." may stay unchecked. Don't forget to set the folder view to Icons and apply it to all folders in the Folder Options dialog window. * Shoot The Dog! Does anyone like the animated character in the search window? That's what I thought. Tweak UI for Windows XP (see the link above) will make it gone forever. Tweak UI - Explorer - Check "Use Classic Search In Explorer" and "Use Classic Search In Internet Explorer." * More Tweak UI Settings. More Tweak UI settings to change: Taskbar and Start Menu: Uncheck "Enable Balloon Tips." Desktop: Set the first icon to "My Computer." My Computer: Check "Control Panel"; Uncheck "Files Stored On This Computer" (this will remove My Documents and Shared Documents folders from My Computer). Change The Shell Attention! The author bears no responsibility whatsoever for your actions done as directed below! Do this at your own risk! Windows XP Classic Pack 1.4 (NT4 flavor) is ready! Now it comes with an all-in-one registry tweak and a couple of batch scripts to back up your original files and disable system file caching. It changes your Windows XP shell almost completely into Windows NT 4.0 shell (see screenshots)! The pack uses 7-zip archiving format. You need 7-zip (native, free) or WinRAR (shareware) to unpack it. 7-zip: http://www.7-zip.org The pack is for Windows XP SP1/SP2 English version only! For other language versions, you can make your own pack. For this one, I used the freeware program Resource Hacker to change the icons of system files. There are many others too that you could use for that. Resource Hacker: http://www.auburn.edu/~nzk0001/bin/arc/reshack.tar.bz2 You can't just overwrite or change all the files from within your XP system. (The idea of overwriting is just bad, so save the original files somewhere before you start playing a surgeon.) If your system is on a FAT32 partition with DOS access, you can just do it from DOS. If your Windows XP is on NTFS (which is most likely), you can't access it from DOS (well, there are boot floppies out there which give you write access to NTFS from DOS, like UBD, but they are usually not very reliable and may crash, often doing something unpleasant to your NTFS partition). The best way is to use the Recovery Console. You can boot from your Windows XP CD and choose the Recovery Console option, or just install the Recovery Console (on your Windows CD, find the file i386\winnt32.exe and run it from the command line with the /cmdcons switch, for example, if your CD-ROM is E:, then open Start - Run, and type E:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons, or better do it from the CMD Prompt). On boot-up, you will have two options -- boot Windows XP or the Recovery Console (you can change the delay time by editing c:\boot.ini file: timeout=[number of seconds you prefer]). Before going to the recovery console to perform the major change, unpack the Classic Pack for Windows XP and copy the files to the Windows folder with different names/extensions -- just don't forget which is which. The reason is that the Recovery Console usually gives you write access only within the Windows directory. I personally change all the extensions into *.new, like explorer.new, notepad.new, etc. (Though it should actually be "old"!) So, copy the *.new files into your Windows and Windows\system32 directories accordingly. Then boot into the recovery console and replace the files with the classic ones. In my case, renaming explorer.exe looked like this: cd c:\windows ren explorer.exe explorer.xp ren explorer.new explorer.exe The first REN command backed up the original XP explorer.exe into an *.xp file (you can name it any way you prefer), the second one replaced the system file with its classic version. Bear in mind that the Recovery Console, unlike Windows Command Prompt or DOS, does not support wildcards, so you have to type all filenames in full. Proceed with each file in the same way (you can reduce your Recovery Console session as most CPL files, for example, can be replaced in Windows; the files which can be replaced in the Recovery Console only are shell32.dll, msgina.dll, mydocs.dll. Explorer.exe can be replaced from Windows if you kill the explorer process before changing the file, and then restart its new version. Boot up your Windows and see the change. It will most probably ask you to insert your original XP CD as "some files were replaced by their unrecognized versions." Just refuse to do it and agree "to keep the unrecognized versions." In case the System File Checker wakes up on logon and starts checking the system files, stop it as well. Sometimes the interface may not change. That happens because Windows may overwrite the new files with the original copies from Windows\system32\dllcache. In this case, you will have to overwrite the dllcache copies with the classic pack files (if you have made the copies of all originals already). Or, it just might be that the system is loading old icons from the cache. Just find the file C:\Documents and Settings\[your user name]\Local Settings\Application Data\IconCache.db and delete it, then restart your Explorer shell (kill it and run it again, or log off and log back on), and your cache will fill up with the new icons. Cleaning Up After Repair * My Computer. Show Dial-Up Networking, Printers and Scheduled Tasks in My Computer (like in Windows 98/NT). This can be done by running these registry files: reg/dialup.reg: Show Dial-Up Networking in My Computer reg/printers.reg: Show Printers in My Computer reg/schtasks.reg: Show Scheduled Tasks in My Computer * MS Sans Serif. Beginning with Windows 2000, the main system font is Tahoma. When you choose Windows Classic color scheme, many of the windows get back MS Sans Serif, but not all. This registry file sets MS Sans Serif everywhere in your system. reg/f_serif.reg: Set MS Sans Serif as the system font reg/f_tahoma.reg: Set back Tahoma as the system font * Windows Explorer/Internet Explorer Icons. The BMP templates that show the icons on your Windows/Internet Explorer toolbar are located in the shell32.dll file, and they are probably the last that's now left of the new XP look, but editing them requires a lot of designer effort and minute cuts'n'pastings. You can try that if you want, but there is an easier solution to it -- Y'Z Toolbar. From my site, you can download the stripped-down version of it (yztb.7z)-- I left only the English language (since very few of you would ever need Japanese) and the Win2K theme out of eight. This very Win2K theme makes all your Explorer icons look like in Windows 98/ME/2000! The program leaves an icon in the notification area when running -- and as long as it's running your Explorer icons will keep the classic look. You can put a link to it in your Startup folder so that it would start with Windows. * Other Settings. - In the classic Explorer shell, you have the Find item in the Start menu (beginning with Windows 2000/ME, it became "Search"). However, the Find items "For Files" and "For People" now present an example of bad grammar. This can be fixed via the registry. reg/findmenu.reg: Set "Files" and "People" Find items - Did you know about the existence of the classic User control panel applet in XP? It can be invoked on running the command "control userpasswords2". To make it pop up from the Control Panel instead of the new XP one, run this registry fix: reg/cpuser2.reg: Classic User Control Panel applet The XP applet now can be called via "control userpasswords". Attention: this action, unlike all others before, is hard to reverse, though you can try editing the registry manually to roll back. - If you worked much with the previous versions of Windows, you could notice that the possibility of making your icons display in 16 colors, which could be easily done from the Display window by unchecking the option "Show Icons Using All Possible Colors" is now gone from XP. But it can still be easily controlled by running these registry files: reg/icons_256color.reg: Show Icons In Reduced Color (16 color palette) reg/icons_fullcolor.reg: Show Icons Using All Possible Colors When you have the 32-bit screen color depth, the icons may still show in full color. By reducing your screen color depth down to 16-bit (Display Properties - Settings - Color Quality), the 16-color icon fix should work.