Royale Noir Theme for WinXP

Review

Free Download

Apply the theme never released officially by Microsoft

What’s new in Royale Noir Theme for WinXP 1.47:

• Updated cursors
• Used 3D menus
• Adjusted colors
• More visible groupbox

Read the full changelog

Windows XP is not popular in terms of theme customization, in the way that it doesn’t sport a rich collection of built-in skins. Instead, users can rely on Internet resources to download and install various themes to make their desktop look better.

Royale Noir Theme for WinXP is one way to enhance your OS’s appearance. Based on the original Royale Theme, this one brings the same advantages, but slightly changes the colors for the taskbar and the start panel. In order to install and run it, the program requires Uxtheme Multi-patcher (uxtheme.dll system file needs to be patched to allow themes to be successfully deployed).

After a quick installation process, Royale Noir Theme for WinXP opens the Display Properties window, allowing you to further customize the theme. At this point, the wallpaper is set to a beautiful and calm nature inspired background that you’ll simply love.

The theme reflects on a bunch of Windows elements, such as taskbar, standard windows, startup and shutdown dialogs and several others. It mainly consists of a dark background and dark title bars, in black and gray.

We found it to be visually appealing and, to our surprise, the effect of white text on a black background didn’t turn out to be disturbing for the eyes. It performed beautifully during our tests, without affecting in any way the system’s performance.

All in all, Royale Noir Theme for WinXP was designed to enhance the appearance of your XP system with dramatic looks. It was actually created by artists, which makes it all the more interesting. But if black is not your favorite color, you can always try out the original Royale theme.

Royale Noir Theme for WinXP

Review

Free Download

Apply the theme never released officially by Microsoft

What’s new in Royale Noir Theme for WinXP 1.47:

• Updated cursors
• Used 3D menus
• Adjusted colors
• More visible groupbox

Read the full changelog

Windows XP is not popular in terms of theme customization, in the way that it doesn’t sport a rich collection of built-in skins. Instead, users can rely on Internet resources to download and install various themes to make their desktop look better.

Royale Noir Theme for WinXP is one way to enhance your OS’s appearance. Based on the original Royale Theme, this one brings the same advantages, but slightly changes the colors for the taskbar and the start panel. In order to install and run it, the program requires Uxtheme Multi-patcher (uxtheme.dll system file needs to be patched to allow themes to be successfully deployed).

After a quick installation process, Royale Noir Theme for WinXP opens the Display Properties window, allowing you to further customize the theme. At this point, the wallpaper is set to a beautiful and calm nature inspired background that you’ll simply love.

The theme reflects on a bunch of Windows elements, such as taskbar, standard windows, startup and shutdown dialogs and several others. It mainly consists of a dark background and dark title bars, in black and gray.

We found it to be visually appealing and, to our surprise, the effect of white text on a black background didn’t turn out to be disturbing for the eyes. It performed beautifully during our tests, without affecting in any way the system’s performance.

All in all, Royale Noir Theme for WinXP was designed to enhance the appearance of your XP system with dramatic looks. It was actually created by artists, which makes it all the more interesting. But if black is not your favorite color, you can always try out the original Royale theme.

Royale Noir for Windows

Softonic review

A secret XP theme is uncovered

Royale Noir is a great, free Windows program, that belongs to the category Desktop customization software with subcategory Themes (more specifically Operating Systems).

More about Royale Noir

Royale Noir is available for users with the operating system Windows 98 and former versions, and it is available in English. The current version of the software is XP theme and was updated on 10/30/2006.Since we added this software to our catalog in 2006, it has managed to achieve 207,371 downloads, and last week it had 20 downloads.About the download, Royale Noir is a reasonably light software that does not require as much space than the average program in the section Desktop customization software. It’s very heavily used in many countries such as India, Albania, and United States.

Author’s review

Royale Noir is an almost exact copy of Royale except with a dark purplish tint. If Royale was day, Royale Noir is night. No doubt about it, this is a ‘dark’ theme. If you’re the sort of person who likes bright and vivid colors, stay away from this theme.

As W3bbo pointed out, there are quite definitely issues with this theme due to its incompleteness. The most obvious being, the “Start” button’s hover and active states are unchanged from Royale, inconsistent with the purple tint surrounding. However, there is even a color scheme for Office 2003 so it will not default to the blue Luna colors.

Looking at it from the big picture, Royale Noir is a welcomed alternative to the extremely small collection of verified-by-Microsoft XP themes. However being incomplete, it is not recommended for the general consumers. Enthusiasts are welcomed to try it to stand out from the crowd, but even still, you’ll feel right at home with the familiar Luna/Royale style.

Royale Theme for Windows

Softonic review

Change the look of XP with this theme pack

The Royale Theme is a slick black theme for Windows XP which originally leaked out of Microsoft and onto the web in 2005.

There’s no way to know but Royale Theme seems to have come out of the new version of Windows Media Centre that Microsoft developed for XP. The Royale theme is remarkably similar to XP’s default Luna theme, but is a much sleeker shade of black. If you are tired of the default theme then you’ll surely find something that appeals in Royale Theme.

The Royale Theme is also a remarkably small download at 2MB so there’s no need to worry that it’s going to slow down your machine, although it does take up slightly more RAM. If you’re on a slow machine, however, you might want to think twice before installing it. The installation is very simple — simply download Royale Theme and run the .EXE and it will ask you automatically where you want to install it. If you choose C:\WINDOWS path the Royale Theme files will automatically be placed in the Resources Folder on your computer.

Once the Royale Theme is installed, you’ll still need to activate it by right-clicking on your desktop, selecting Properties, then Appearance and finally Windows and Buttons. Select the Media Center Style option and click apply and the screen may go black while the theme is applied.

If you’re bored with XP’s default theme, this is an excellent free way to spice up your desktop and Windows itself.

Author’s review

Royale Theme for Win XP is adds an elegant touch to your desktop. You can modify the whole style with these relaxing smooth shades of blue.

It does not require any programs to install and can be set up in a matter of seconds. This theme will freshen up your desktop.

Royale Remixed Theme for Windows

Softonic review

Attractive Royale theme based on Noir and Zune

Royale Remixed Theme will not only change your desktop wallpaper and windows appearance, but it will also replace your system icons, mouse cursors and system sounds with new files. In fact, the Royale Remixed Theme makes Windows look like a completely new — and very attractive — system.

Some time ago Microsoft launched Royale Theme for Windows XP, a slick, elegant blue theme that many adopted immediately. A new Royale theme appeared after that, this time in a very elegant black. However, this dark Royale was not finished and you could clearly tell it needed some polishing. The same happened with the Zune theme created by Microsoft to celebrate the launch of their MP3 player. It seemed someone had leaked them before they had been finished properly.

Bearing that in mind, an independent designer has finished the job, presenting Royale Remixed Theme, a theme for Windows XP that fixes all the bugs in the Noir and Zune themes and adds everything they lacked.

Just bear in mind that Royale Remixed Theme is not as easy to install as it seems. If you have problems, it’s probably because you need to patch a DLL file (see Notes). Also, if you want to customize the shutdown window to match the rest of the system, you’ll have to modify another couple of DLL files. Fortunately, this process is very clearly explained in a TXT document included in Royale Remixed Theme’s ZIP file.

Customize Windows XP with this elegant shiny black design.

Author’s review

This mod grew from a finishing Royale Noir project to encompass Zune bug fixing as well. If you are a fan of Microsoft’s Royale, this is the only Royale theme you will ever need.

The theme now consists of 3 color schemes, Royale, Royale Noir and Royale Zune. For Royale Noir, Microsoft came 50% of the way, and I went the other 50%, a lot of work and bugfixes was done to finish the theme. For Zune, work was done to better the distasteful orange and many bugfixes implemented that Microsoft messed up.