How to Include Custom Themes in Windows XP, MCE or 2003 Setup?
If you are a Windows XP, MCE or 2003 user and use 3rd party themes like VistaVG in your Windows, then many times you might have wondered how to include these themes in Windows setup so that it can install and apply itself whenever you install Windows.
Now no longer wondering or wait. Just follow these simple steps and you’ll be able to include your desired themes in Windows setup:
1. Copy your Windows Setup from CD to your hard disk.
2. Suppose you copied the whole setup to D:Setup folder. Now open Setup folder.
3. You’ll see a few folders like I386, etc. Now create a new folder $OEM$
4. Open $OEM$ folder and create another new folder $$
5. Open $$ folder and create another new folder Resources
6. Open Resources folder and create another new folder Themes
7. So the final path will be:
D:Setup$OEM$$$ResourcesThemes
8. Now copy your desired theme’s folder and .theme file from %windir%ResourcesThemes folder and paste into the new “Themes” folder which you created earlier.
9. Now goto “I386″ folder in the Setup and look for file “WINNT.SIF“. Open it in Notepad and paste following lines at last.
[Shell]
CustomDefaultThemeFile = “%WinDir%ResourcesThemesVistaVG Ultimate.theme”
NOTE: We have taken “VistaVG Ultimate” theme in our tutorial, if you want to include any other theme, then replace “VistaVG Ultimate” with your desired theme name.
10. Save the file and you have done. Now you can create a new Setup CD using this customized Windows setup.
TIP: If you want to do the same using utilities, then use nLite which can also do the job easily and automatically.
How to Include Your Edited System Files in Windows Setup?
Many times we edit system files like Shell32.dll, Explorer.exe, msgina.dll, ntoskrnl.exe, logonui.exe, etc to change the look-n-feel of Windows. But sometimes we want to include our edited files in Windows Setup, so that whenever we make a fresh installation of Windows, we don’t loose our changed files and we don’t need to make those changes again.
Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to include your own edited files in Windows Setup:
1. Download following .Zip file and extract it:
2. You’ll get “modifype.exe” file after extracting the .zip file.
3. Now copy this “modifype.exe” file to the same folder where you have your edited files which you want to include in Windows setup. Lets suppose you have copied all edited files in “D:Setup” folder, so copy “modifype.exe” file to “D:Setup” folder.
4. Open Command Prompt and navigate to the same folder where your files are stored, which is “D:Setup” in our example.
5. Now provide following command:
modifype file_name.extension -c
Replace “file_name.extension” with the name of the file which you want to include in setup. e.g.
modifype shell32.dll -c
modifype explorer.exe -c
modifype msgina.dll -c
6. It’ll fix the checksum of the file and Windows will accept the file without any problem at installation time.
7. Now the last step. We have to compress the file using “makecab” command. As you can see all files in Windows Setup folder “I386” are in compressed format like shell32.dl_, explorer.ex_, msgina.dl_, etc. So provide following command to compress the file:
makecab file_name.extension
Replace “file_name.extension” with the name of the file which you want to include in setup. e.g.
makecab shell32.dll
makecab explorer.exe
makecab msgina.dll
8. Thats it. You’ll get a compressed file, which you can safely copy to “I386” folder of your Windows setup.
NOTE: If you want to extract any existing file from the Setup, you can use “expand” command.
expand -r file_name.extension
Replace “file_name.extension” with the name of the file which you want to extract. e.g.
expand -r shell32.dl_
expand -r explorer.ex_
expand -r msgina.dl_
nLite: Customize Windows XP Setup and Remove Unwanted Components
Have you ever wanted to remove Windows components like Media Player, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, MSN Explorer, Messenger…
How about not even to install them with Windows ?
nLite is a tool for permanent Windows components removal and pre-installation Windows configuration. After removal there is an option to make bootable image ready for burning on cd or testing in virtual machines.
With nLite you will be able to have Windows installation which on install does not include, or even contain on cd, the unwanted components.
Features
- Service Pack Integration
- Component Removal
- Unattended Setup
- Driver Integration *
- Hotfixes Integration **
- Tweaks
- Services Configuration
- Patches ***
- Bootable ISO creation
* - Textmode (CD Boot) and normal PnP
** - hotfixes with white icons, *KB*.exe, including update packs
and Internet Explorer 7
***- supports generic SFC, Uxtheme, TcpIp and Usb Polling patching.
nLite supports Windows 2000, XP x86/x64 and 2003 x86/x64 in all languages.
It needs .NET Framework 2.0 in order to run… Check if you have it already, maybe on some of your CDs before downloading if your connection is slow.
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