Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Using Windows 7 theme desktop background on your Mac

I have a Windows 7 laptop and my wife has a Mac.

Microsoft has some beautiful wall-papers that they provide as part of their Windows 7 theme packs.

image

My wife wanted these for her laptop too. So instead of just copying the files over to her computer, I decided to try and figure out how to let her open up themes directly on her own Mac so that she could use them.

Here are the steps:

The Windows 7 theme packs are just zip files. Unfortunately, just renaming them and then trying to unzip them on a Mac does not work. Instead what you need is the StuffIt Expander tool: Download it from: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/stuffitexpander.html

Next go over to the Microsoft Personalization Gallery: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/personalize and download a theme to your desktop.

Screen shot 2009-11-10 at 7.06.27 PM

Go to the Applications folder and open up StuffIt Expander.
Screen shot 2009-11-10 at 7.08.13 PM

Next drag the theme file on to the StuffIt Expander window.

Screen shot 2009-11-10 at 7.08.41 PM

This will extract the files from inside the theme file onto your desktop. Browse to the folder inside containing all the wall-papers for the theme. Copy the images over to your pictures folder (or where ever you keep all your wall paper images). Thats it. you are done!

Screen shot 2009-11-10 at 7.09.12 PM Screen shot 2009-11-10 at 7.09.31 PM

One of my favorite themes is the “Bing’s Best” theme. (The thumbnails in the first image in this post are from that theme).

Enjoy!

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