I’m bored with the default desktop themes on my Windows 10 (Win10.1) computer. How can I safely download more?
I like the default Desktop themes that are included in Microsoft Windows 10, but I can also understand how you’d get bored with them after a while, particularly if you can see your desktop, something that many Windows users have quite a challenge with, as their desktop seems to be completely covered with app icons, files and folders. 🙂
You’re wise to be suspicious of random downloads that offer you new, better themes or even new desktop wallpapers because all too many of them are malware carriers, just as new cursors can be a journey to massive trouble on your PC. There’s no free lunch. Well, except there is, if you go to Microsoft and you go through Windows itself to find the Microsoft-approved desktop themes…
As always, start with Cortana search by clicking on the magnifying glass icon on the Taskbar:
A search for “desktop theme” brings up the match “Themes and related settings”.
That works. Click on it.
You can see that my current theme is giving me rather low contrast text colors, but peer closely and you’ll see “Theme settings“. That’s the one you want, click on it.
Now you’ll see your current theme and the other themes you have available:
You can see that I just have the default themes on my own Windows 10 system, but where your attention should really be is the link near the middle right of the window “Get more themes online“.
Click on “Get more themes online” and it’ll open up your browser. I use Microsoft Edge on this Windows 10 system, of course:
Now you can peruse to your heart’s content, there are hundreds of different themes here on the Microsoft.com site, and they’re all scrubbed clean and free of any viruses or malware. Fortunately!
I can waste a lot of time on this site, actually, so I’ll try to just find one of the Featured Themes, as shown below:
At this point I look for themes that have a lot of images: Notice that “Community Showcase: Dramatic Skies 3” has 21 images, while the “Aurora Borealis” only has 8 images in its theme. Since you’re looking for non-boring, more images is definitely better!
In fact, I’m going to download the Community Showcase theme, which is easily done with a click on “Download“.
Then it’ll download the images and information:
Doesn’t take long, it’s not a big file even with 21 high resolution images…
Ready to go? Click on “Open” and…
There it is, a new theme.
But of course it’s not until you close all the windows that you get the full impact:
Absolutely gorgeous! And easily downloaded and installed, as shown.
Now your challenge will be not to download 50 new themes. Though that’s not a huge issue as they aren’t particularly large… 🙂