Less than a week to go for happy holidays so we thought why don’t we give away yet another great Windows 7 goodie this Christmas season. A few days back we gave you Christmas 2010 Windows 7 Theme and you did like it a lot. This time we bring you Santa Claus theme for Windows 7 loaded with high resolution wallpapers. Download this Windows 7 theme and share it with your friends. Please don’t hotlink to the file (Santa won’t like it you see). Share this page’s URL instead.

Download Santa Claus Windows 7 theme

Wallpaper Credits: Crestok, HDWalls, dA

Don’t miss this another Christmas 2010 themepack:

Oh times fly so fast. I still remember the time we published Christmas Themes and Wallpapers last year as if it were yesterday. But the festival is back and we, too, are back with some really beautiful, handpicked and high-resolution wallpapers packed into a Windows 7 theme. The preview below will definitely make you click that download link for sure. ;) I won’t say anything further. Credits fly out to the wonderful designers. If you do share the themepack, please do not hotlink. Use the link to his post instead.

Download Christmas 2010 Windows 7 Themepack

Wallpapers included can be found here.

Don’t miss the LATEST Santa Claus Windows 7 Theme:

Happy Christmas!

Yet another day and the giant continues to acquire startups. Just a couple of days ago we did a post about Google’s 8 acquisitions in the first quarter of 2010. This time it’s BumpTop – a desktop customization application that brings in real-life simulation of your desk. I have used BumpTop and it’s a decent software. BumpTop is for Windows and Mac platforms and will be downloadable for one last week starting today at the official BumpTop site.

BumpTop just made an announcement about the acquisition –

Today, we have a big announcement to make: we’re excited to announce that we’ve been acquired by Google! This means that BumpTop (for both Windows and Mac) will no longer be available for sale. Additionally, no updates to the products are planned.

Although the valuation amount is not yet disclosed, the Wellington Financial Blog assumes it to be around $35-40 million. On the other hand we might as well start to think why Google would acquire a desktop replacement application. Are we about to witness a 3D desktop on Android OS? Or (just for the sake of an argument) a UI surprise for Chrome OS?

As for BumpTop, you still have one week to grab the client application and experience it yourself. BumpTop Pro users will have to validate their copy to avail end-of-life support.

We are back again with some really nice high quality widescreen wallpapers. This time we have some minimalistic awesomeness for you. Download these beautiful wallpapers by clicking their thumbnails below. [Artists have been creditted]

Water Drops by Alexander

Aerostream by ve1n

Tenere Tree by vladstudio

Green Field by DeskCity

Last Stripes by Hemingway81

Enjoy your weekend

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Safari is a browser that implements cutting edge font smoothing techniques. Any page rendered in Safari looks really good and pleasing to the eye compared to other browsers. Now if you are on Mac OS X, it turns out you won’t have any problem with font smoothing on other browsers thanks to the system-wide implementation of the font smoothing technique.

On Windows however, there still is a slight glitch. Of course, we have ClearType here but let’s face it, it’s not as great as the one on OS X. Now before I tell you how to have Safari like font-smoothing on Firefox, IE8 or Opera, I’d like to show you what it really means:

See the difference. Trust me if you really need to experience the web in sophisticated way, you need something better than ClearType. You need GDI++.

GDI++ offers Mac OS X like font rendering on Windows, giving you much cleaner and smooth display of fonts. Above screenshots were taken on Firefox with GDI++ ON and OFF. Download GDI++ from the link given below, unzip the files and simply run gditray.exe. Results will be immediate. The best part is the font smoothing will be system-wide. GDI++ basically overrides Windows’ native ClearType tuning to achieve better results. Once you feel the change, I am sure you’d never want to go back.

Download GDI++

I still remember the time when the first Vista transformation pack was made available for XP and how I went so crazy to download a 31MB file on my dial-up connection. Well, Vista came and gone and even Windows 7 seems so 2009. We need something new, don’t we? So here it is – The Vienna 5 Transformation Pack for Windows 7!

Now don’t ask me why the name Vienna. It’s been one of the most speculated names for the next version of Windows after Vista but that didn’t happen. Maybe to pay a tribute, a deviantArt user, AppliArt named it Vienna 5 Transformation Pack.

Before I give out the download links, enjoy the screenshots:

This transformation pack is available for Windows 7 and Windows XP. Visit the below links and download the required version.

Download Vienna 5 Transformation Pack / 96.2 MB

After you download it, run an update available for it by clicking the below link.

Update for Vienna 5 Transformation Pack

There are lot of wallpaper managing software available on the internet today. Mostly all of them have pretty much similar functionality like maintaining a list of wallpapers and changing them at regular intervals. Today we have featured a slightly different wallpaper managing software – Dream Desktop.

Dream desktop is different in a sense that the wallpapers it uses are located somewhere on the internet. The application lets you browse through their ever growing collection of extremely high quality wallpapers. You can either choose to display all the wallpapers in the collection or your marked favorites at specified time intervals. Apparently you can download the wallpapers too if you wish.

Dream Desktop is much sophisticated too. Every aspect of the client software is superbly intuitive and is low on resources. It also gives notifications when new wallpapers are added to their online collections. Apart from that, the upcoming versions will support games too. Download Dream Desktop and experience it. I find the software rather awesome.

Download Dream Desktop / 696KB

Beginner Tip

Today I had a discussion with my friend about a troubleshooting session in which he wanted to change icons of some the folders. He wanted to use the native new Windows 7 icons which he could not find the new icons in its default location. Although he figured out after a while, I thought of sharing this small info.

So if you want to use the new 256×256 Windows 7 icon library, you might not get it in the default shell32.dll. Here’s what you need to do:

» Select the folder. ‘Right click’ on it > ‘Properties’.

» In the properties window, click the ‘Customize’ tab.

» Here, click the ‘Change Icon…’ button.

» In the window that appears, you will find that the icons here are very old (from Windows 2000 and XP era). You just need to replace the location to C:\Windows\system32\imageres.dll (where C: is the Windows installation drive)

Replace ‘shell32.dll’ with ‘imageres.dll’ and you will be able to use new 256 x 256 Windows 7 icons. imageres.dll is the new icon library.

» Select your desired icon and click ‘OK’.

Enjoy new 256 x 256 icons !

Microsoft recently rolled out the IE 9 Platform Preview which has created a sort of anticipation within me. Not that I am a hardcore IE fan but being a Windows user since stone age, I love it when something new comes out of Redmond. So I thought of teasing the so-called winboys and made 12 high resolution (2560 x 1600) IE 9 Teaser Wallpapers.

6 of these wallpapers have a teaser line written on them; the rest are without it.

Preview:

Download IE9 Teaser Wallpapers / 10.8 MB

PS: Do not hotlink to the zipped file. The download link will change frequently so provide a link-back from your website/blog instead.

It’s a lazy weekend and the internet seems literally on strike. So I thought of slipping out a few abstract widescreen wallies. When it comes to abstract, I am little too choosy with the color schemes. Too light shades are not my types. So here goes the soothing dark ones. All the wallpapers are minimum 1900×1200.

Bokeh Starflight by Renecac

Bright Wind by Zastavski

Tentacles of Light by fukm

Jeans by lassekongo83

Black Grunge by Whatsamahoozit

Artists have been credited.