April 04, 2007
Energy Blue Theme Unleashed
Every once in a while Microsoft will release a new Windows Theme in support of a new product. The two that I know of off the top of my head are the Zune and Energy Blue themes for the Zune and Tablet PC, respectively. The Zune theme was released to the world in general, but the Energy Blue theme was only released as part of the Table PC Experience Pack. Luckily it was released as a simple MSI for easy extraction.
What you'll need:
- Orca
This is an excellent MSI database viewer included with the Windows® Server 2003 SP1 Platform SDK [microsoft.com] - Microsoft Experience Pack for Tablet PC [microsoft.com]
This is the package containing the Energy Blue theme. - Skillz ;-p
Steps:
- Install Orca from the SDK
- Launch the Experience Pack installer [InstallExperiencePack.exe]
This should give you an error message, DON"T CLICK ANYTHING YET. - Open the system temp directory (just run %TEMP%)
There should be a folder like IXP000.TMP or something similar - Copy Launcher.msi from the IXP000 directory into the temp directory.
- Close the installer by getting rid of all the warnings and errors.
- Now the fun begins. Run Orca and open the Launcher.msi file
- Delete all references to IsTablePC and IsTabletSP2 within the InstallExecuteSequence, InstallUISequence and LaunchCondition tables
- Run Launcher.msi. Note: This MSI is just a container for a plethora of other MSI databases.
- Continue with the installation until it asks you which components you want to install
- Choose the Energy Blue theme and click Install
- You should get an error about only installing on Tablet PC computers. Again, DON'T CLICK ANYTHING YET.
- Copy the newly created MSI from the %temp% directory to the same directory, but name it something like EnergyBlue.msi. Note: The newly created MSI is usually some name like e323e3.msi
- Open the EnergyBlue.msi file in Orca
- Remove all references to IsTabletPC and PIDCHECK from the InstallExecuteSequence, InstallUISequence and LaunchCondition tables
- Save the EnergyBlue MSI and run it
You should now be able to enjoy the brightness that is Energy Blue!
Posted by Guy at 07:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack