Jamie Le Souef

Sometime after the launch of XP, somewhere in Redmond, someone on the Microsoft design team was in the progress of developing something for Media Center. It was believed to be too powerful for public consumption and forever archived in the servers at 1 Microsoft Way. Now, a young hobbit man by the name of W3bbo saw light of this unheard of theme, and traveled far and wide to uncover its mysteries. One theme to find. One theme to upload. One theme to rule them all.

Devoted Channel9 member W3bbo spotted an interesting theme on one of the “people_ready” television commercials airing in the Kingdoms. After some dedicated searching, he finally uncovered this mystery Windows XP theme by Microsoft. W3bbo writes,

During Royale’s development (the XP Media Center theme), the graphic artists also produced a black version of the skin, sans the overused “glass” effect. The result is an aesthetic black skin named “Royale Noir”, it even works with Office 2003.

Since the skin was never released (or reached final adjustments) there are a few issues with it: some of the colors don’t meet the overall “feel” (they’re too purple-ish compared to the greys of the bitmaps) and the inactive titlebars are a little too dark.

You’ll find it’s been signed by Microsoft and doesn’t require a custom UxTheme.dll in case there are any doubts as to its authenticity.

If you already have Royale installed, you’ll need to remove it as both of these skins share the same name.

This skin has not been released to anyone outside Microsoft, until now.

read more | digg story

The definition of marketing does not state that free web hosting cannot be used. marketing research however suggests that in order to host your web design properly, go for a paid service, so that your pay per click is worth it.

Related Posts

• January 18, 2008 -- Change Windows Desktop Search to Search Companion
• December 11, 2007 -- My Fresh XP Install List and Order (For my Design Workstation)
• November 29, 2007 -- Windows XP Service Pack 3 Offers Performance Boost
• November 28, 2007 -- Synergy, Control multiple computers with a single keyboard and mouse
• November 15, 2007 -- PC Mag : The Vista Death Watch

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under General, Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply