How To Make Windows 11 Look Like Windows 7

okay you guys asked for it and I've been avoiding doing this for quite a while but today we're gonna make Windows 11 look like Windows 7. there was a lot that I had to figure out to make this worth doing that's because this is not simply going to be a start menu replacement but we're going to get Arrow glass working in Windows 11. stay tuned [Music] I've made Windows 11 look like OS X I've made it look indistinguishable from Windows 10. I've even made it look like Windows XP but the one mod that you guys always keep asking me for every time I do one of these videos is to make Windows 11 look like Windows 7. clearly there's a lot of Windows 7 fans out there and I completely get it Windows 7 is a really good looking OS but you see that right there is the problem that's exactly why I haven't done it these videos are not simply start menu Replacements I try to legitimately make Windows 11 look like the other operating system in fact to the point where if someone sits at your computer they would think you're running the other operating system however to do that with Windows 7 requires one thing that I've never been able to achieve before and that's aeroglass when Windows 7 came out it had a revolutionary new theme that used a combination of three-dimensional accents with transparencies known as aeroglass unfortunately with Windows 10 Microsoft flattened the operating system down and took away the transparency effects getting them back wasn't easy and I really hope you guys appreciate this because I spent days and countless hours trying to make this guide easy to follow and look really good this took multiple different experiments that mostly turned out like trash but eventually I think I really nailed the look but first before we jump into it we got to pay some bills so check out today's sponsor is your copy of Windows 10 unactivated well it doesn't have to be because with today's sponsor VIP SCD key you can get a valid Windows 10 license for under 20 dollars stop dealing with that stupid watermark on the desktop the valid license for Windows 10. also with an activated copy of Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free just go to the link in the description below and pick up a valid Windows 10 license key during checkout use the code cyber C GPU for a 25 discount once you have your key go to your activation settings in Windows 10 and click on the link that says change product key enter the product key you just purchased and hit activate now you don't have to deal with that stupid Watermark that come with running an unactivated copy of Windows 10. now on with the video okay with that out of the way let's make Windows 11 look like Windows 7. all right here we go we're in a default install of Windows 11. this is about as default as you can get so if you look if we open up file explorer here you'll see that Windows 11 does have a unique theme and this is unique to Windows 11 and you guys all know this Theme by now but it's got the rounded corners but it's a really flattened down operating system it's not like Windows Vista and Windows 7 was where's a real three-dimensional look and this flattened look kind of started around Windows 8 to Windows 10 era and you know this is one of the reasons that people like Windows 7 is because Windows 7 is a more 3D looking operating system so the first thing that we're going to do is try to kind of get some of them elements back and to do that there's going to be several programs that you're going to need but we're going to start out with one to give us the transparency effect here in our borders of our windows so I'm going to go ahead and close this and for that we're going to need a program called Mica for everyone you can pick this up on GitHub and I'll have links to all of the programs that we're going to be using down in the description below so to download this just go ahead and click on latest and then from latest you're going to scroll down you want to download the release installer so it's going to be the first one right here so we're going to click on that and it's going to download just go ahead and hit keep and chrome if it gives you any errors we're going to go ahead and let it install and then we're going to show it in folder here and we'll go ahead and minimize our browser here and we're going to go ahead and set it up and setting this up go ahead and just click install for all users or only for you depends on what you want I'm going to go ahead and hit yes to user account control and go through the regular setup process and then once it sets up once you go to launch it it's going to ask you to install the.net core which if you don't have it you're going to need to install it so go ahead and hit yes and it should take you right to the website and then from there it should download it automatically we're going to go ahead and click on it here go ahead and install it real quick and then from that point we're going to minimize our browser again and then once that is installed you have to actually start the program now so if we click on the start button you can see right here in Windows 11 it has it as recently added so we're going to go ahead and start it real quick and once it starts it should start automatically down in the bottom right here so once it's open then you go ahead and click on it and you get the settings right here so for these settings right here obviously you want it to run at startup you don't want to have to launch it yourself every time and then from there we want to go into these rules right here now the way this program looks like it works is if you set up a global rule then all the other rules as long as they're set to default should follow but I've found that that isn't actually the case this is actually a really buggy program but it's the only one I could find that could give us the effect that we want so if we go to Global rule the title bar color you're just going to want to go ahead and click on dark and then from there for the backdrop type instead of mica you want to go to acrylic and then for the corner mode the default corners for Windows 11 obviously you know that they're the rounded corners but Windows 7 also had rounded corners but they weren't as pronounced so for there we can go slightly rounded to give a slightly rounded corners and then at this point you go through all of these other settings down here and you set these exactly the same as you did back then and now as I'm setting them you can see that it's changing on our other window right here so if we go to Corner mode we go slightly rounded it kind of changes the corners to be more like Windows 7 with just a slight roundness and then Ms paint we're going to do exactly the same thing we're going to go to dark we're going to go to acrylic and we're going to go to slightly rounded and then console window class you don't have to worry about that one you can leave that one default and then from there we can go ahead and close it and then as you can see we have the translucent effect inside of our Windows you can see the background kind of shining through the top bar in the window right here okay now that we have our translucent top bar right here what we need to do next is move on to making our taskbar and start menu look more like Windows 7. obviously it's obviously Windows 11 right now so to do that I'm going to go ahead and close this window here and we're going to start playing around with our taskbar right here so the first program that we're going to need is a program called Explorer Patcher now I've used this one before and I've had it in videos before but it hasn't been updated in a while it was updated in April and unfortunately there are some bugs in it and they're well aware of the bugs but unfortunately there's no fixed form at the moment however I'm going to kind of show you how to get around them to get it to function correctly so if we click on latest right here we're going to scroll down and we're going to pick up the latest executable right here go ahead and download it and if you want get hit keep in Chrome right here Chrome may give you an error and then from there go ahead and run it we're going to hit yes and as you can see everything went blank and then nothing happened our bar didn't show back up and this is actually really easy to fix and what you got to do is just hit Ctrl delete go over to your normal lock screen right here click on task manager and then once task manager opens you want to scroll down to Explorer on the list right here and it's probably going to be close to the end of the list but once you hit it click on explore and then to hit restart task and then once you restart it it should fire up and show you your taskbar again and then from there you can see that there hasn't been any changes to the taskbar but there actually has you just don't realize it yet if you right click you can see there's a much bigger menu now in the taskbar so all you got to do is go on to properties and these are the properties for Explorer Patcher so some of the things that we're going to need to change change is obviously the taskbar style is Windows 11 right now we're going to change this one to Windows 10. and then because the Windows 10 taskbar is a little bit easier to give us the Windows 7 Arrow effects and then as we go down there's a couple other things that you want to do here too like for instance we're going to undo show search we're going to undo task view button and you'll want to come down here where it says combine taskbar icons on primary taskbar it says never combined you want to set this to always combine and then once you do that go ahead and hit the restart file explorer right here and it should restart your file explorer and now that you have now you can tell you have the windows 10 style taskbar right here but if you click on the start button the start menu still opens in the middle but that's okay we're going to move on to that one a little bit okay so we're going to go down to start menu right here and then we want to change this right here to the position on screen from Center to at edge of screen and that'll fix our start menu then from there we want to go into file explorer and from file explorer we want to distance disable this stupid windows 11 context menu so that's this menu right here as you can see this is the windows 11 context menu that does not look like Windows 7. so we're going to click right here and then we're going to click on restart file explorer and then once we restart file explorer if we right click right here you'll see the old-fashioned context menu now this one's a good one to change regardless of what you're trying to make your computer look like the windows 11 context menu stinks I'm so glad there are so many different ways to get rid of it now from here we're just about done with Explorer Patcher we can go ahead and close this right here we have our Windows 10 taskbar down here at the bottom and now we need a Windows 7 start menu obviously because this looks nothing like Windows 7. so for that we're going to go back onto GitHub and we're going to go ahead and download open shell now open shell this is a really common program lots of people have used it before I'm sure you've used it before so we're going to go ahead and click on latest we're going to scroll down and click on open shell setup right here and then again go ahead and hit keep and then from here we're going to go ahead and open the executable and we're going to go ahead and install openshell so from there just go ahead and leave everything default and go ahead and do the setup and hit finish and at this point once you click on the start button you'll get the settings menu right here now a lot of people may not think that openshell can give you a believable Windows 7 start menu at least I've heard that before however we're going to play around with changing some of the themes and once we're done you're going to be surprised at how close to Windows 7 it looks like let's do this okay so the first thing that you want to do is click on show all settings because we're going to need to go through a lot of these settings when we're setting this up right now there's a few things that we're going to need to download before we go any further here and it's actually a skin file that we're going to download for Windows 7 to give it a more believable start menu so go ahead and open up your browser window and I'm going to have this link in the description below this is actually from the Classic Shell forum and if you scroll all the way down to the bottom right here you will find this link here right here where it says Windows 7 like combo revision e skin 7. so we're going to go ahead and click on that and download it and then once it downloads we're going to hit show in folder and then from here we want to right click and hit copy and then click on this PC go into drive C go into program files then you want to go into open shell and then into skins and then from this point you just right click and hit paste and then hit continue in order to paste it into this folder and then you can go ahead and close that and minimize our browser window okay and from this point in order for the skin to load we want to go ahead and close the settings again right click on start hit settings again and we'll get our settings menu back and from here we're going to click on skin right now it's on Metro we're going to click here and we're going to select the Windows 7 combo right here and then you can go through here and you can play with all these settings to your liking there's a lot of settings to tweak this menu right here but by default I think it looks pretty good the way it is however you can kind of go through here and you can set all these settings up to your liking I'm not going to go through a lot of these settings on this video but you can go ahead and go through them yourself and see what kind of tweaks you can come up with in order to dial this in to exactly how you like it now the next thing that we need to do obviously is now that we have our Windows borders as you can see right here I have the translucency and we have our Windows 7 start menu we definitely don't have a Windows 7 taskbar so let me show you how to do that we're going to go ahead and close this go ahead and hit yes right there and the first thing that we need to take care of is that start button looks nothing like Windows 10. so opening up Chrome again there's another Forum post right here and I'll keep this link in the description we want to download this right here and essentially all you got to do is just right click and hit save image as and go ahead and just drop this in your pictures folder right here and then once you've done that go ahead and minimize this and we're going to right click and go back into settings again for open shell from here we want to click on start button and then we want to click on replace start button and then from there we want to select custom button image the button image here and we're going to click these little dots and that'll open up our file explorer and then go ahead and just go to wherever you saved that image that we downloaded before which is this one here we're going to go ahead and hit open once we we hit OK there we have now a Windows 7 start menu and it even has the animation effect so when you run your mouse over it it looks just like Windows 7 did now one thing that you might notice obviously on mine it came out perfectly aligned however if yours isn't you can go ahead and right click hit settings and then you can kind of change the button size and you can change the alignment here see there's a little bit of tweaks that you can do in order to get it to look better to your system right here like for instance if I was to set this to a hundred and hit OK you can see now I've got a giant button so just go ahead and right click on it hit settings and then from here you can kind of tweak this to change the size to whatever fits your needs better so I'm going to set mine to zero just like it was before hit OK and as you can see it's a pretty good size right there now the next thing that we need to do is we have to do something about this taskbar I looked all over for different programs and things like that in order to change this taskbar and believe it or not I found a solution to this problem write an open shell so what you're going to want to do is right click on the start button hit settings and then we're going to want to go over to the taskbar menu from within open shell and obviously we want to click customize taskbar and from there you can already see that it gave us quite a bit of translucent effects but that doesn't look like Windows 7. we need to make it look like Windows 7. so to do that we want to make sure that the transparency is selected right here and then for opacity go ahead and change this to 100 right here and this you might think is taking your opacity away but it'll look good in a minute you just you just wait and see so the next thing we want to do is I want to kind of change the color so I'm going to go ahead and click on this click on these dots and I'm going to go to a lighter blue color right here and it's looking a little bit better but we got quite a ways to go and then for the taskbar text icon obviously normally you'd want to set it to white but as you can see they're not setting to White so this might actually be a bug within the program but there's a way you can fix this if you click on your desk top right click and go to personalize and then from personalize click on colors and then right here where you see the choose your mode instead of light go ahead and go to custom and make sure the windows mode is set to dark and if you do that you'll see that your buttons become white more like the Windows 7 buttons were okay now from there we want to go down to the taskbar texture and this one right here is kind of important because Windows 7 had a 3d effect on the taskbar and obviously we just have a flat taskbar right here so to do that we're going to go ahead and go back into Chrome here and we're going to click back over to the Classic Shell Forum that we were at before and now we want to scroll all the way back up to the top we're going to be looking specifically for a forum post here with a taskbar zip okay right here Windows 7 taskbar zip so go ahead and download that right there and like I said this is exactly the same place where we got the start menu skin from and the link to this will be down in the description below so from here we're going to go ahead and hit show in folder and then from there we're going to go ahead and right click and we're going to extract everything from this folder into our downloads folder here and if you go in here you're going to see that you have several different folders now what we're going to be looking for is taskbars for Windows 8.1 believe it or not because honestly I think they look the best to Windows 7. the Windows 7 taskbar skins really they look good but they don't fit the look like I wanted it to so we're gonna go ahead and close these right here we're going to go back into these settings and for the texture we're going to click on these little dots right here we're going to go into our downloads folder into our taskbars and then we're going to go into Windows 8.1 and we're going to go into the high intensity color the first one right here and if you if you come over here and you look at your large icons you want to make sure to pick the one that is the texture and not the screenshot so in that case it's this one right here that's the one that says taskbar at the end so we click on that hit open and then hit OK and it'll tell you you have to restart openshell at this point so go ahead and hit OK we're going to right click hit exit that'll give us back our Windows 10 start menu click on start here go to all apps and we want to scroll down until we find open shell and then from there we want to click on open shell menu settings and that should open it back up again and as soon as it opens it up you can look and that looks pretty good to the Windows 7 taskbar if you put your window underneath it you can see it has a clear transparency effect to it and if you want to take a look right here we're going to go ahead and click on this texture and I'm going to pick one of the actual Windows 7 ones that it has in here so if we go into our Windows 7 one and we will do let's do this taskbar with reflection here we'll go ahead and hit OK and then we have to exit out and restart open shell again oh right here we can hit menu settings there and as you can see it does give you a Windows 7 like menu and you can kind of see these little effects here but personally it just didn't fit the look for me I I liked the other one better so I'm going to go ahead and quickly go back to that one real quick all right and there we go so now we're starting to look a lot more like Windows 7 we've got the transparency effects within our borders we have the transparency effects within our taskbar and we have a pretty decent looking Windows 7 start menu but we still have Windows 11 icons everywhere we look so the way we're going to fix that is we need a shell 32 dll from Windows 7. so for the shell 32 dll for Windows 7 I highly recommend you source that one from a Windows 7 install I couldn't find a really reputable source to be able to download it from everyone that I found was kind of Shifty so I grabbed mine from a Windows 7 system and that's what I recommend you guys to do to but you can find the shell 32 anywhere that you want it's in the system 32 directory on a Windows 7 system if you need to you can always install Windows 7 in a virtual machine and just steal the dll out of it it might take a while to do it that way but at least it's a way to do it but either way once you get your shell 32 dll so I'm going to go ahead and grab mine real quick I've got mine inside my documents folder right here and I'm going to go ahead and copy that one and I'm going to throw this one onto somewhere on my system I've got a temporary folder here on my C drive but you can throw yours wherever you want I'm going to right click it and paste it here and now make sure what you do is wherever you get your shell32 dll you want to rename it you can't leave it spelled shell32 dll or otherwise windows will confuse it for the one for Windows 11. then you need to leave the one for Windows 11 in place because it's important for the operating system so once you find it just right click go ahead and hit rename and I rename mine shell 32 win7 dll you can rename yours whatever you want as long as you remember what the name is and then once you get this dll in a folder on your system somewhere go ahead and close this and then we're going to go ahead and try to play around with some of our icons so right click on your desktop hit personalize and then from personalized we want to click on themes and then from themes you want to scroll down to desktop icon settings and this will give you your settings for your specific icons so we're going to go ahead and click click on our folder right here we're going to hit change icon and I'm going to hit browse and I'm going to go to C drive cyber CPU shell 32 dll and then from there these are all the icons that you would find in a Windows 7 system so we're going to go ahead and click on our recycle bin full and we're also going to change the recycle bin empty and it's the exact same process you just go through go to your C drive go to wherever you save the dll to and click on your icon there and that's it and now once I hit apply I'm not going to do it yet but once I hit apply you'll see right now you have the windows 11 recycle bin and then I'm going to hit apply and you'll see it'll change right there to the windows 7. and as you can see there's some trash inside of it so if we right click and we hit empty recycle bin hit yes there you go there's an empty Windows 7 recycle bin on your desktop now if you want to do folders and things of that nature you can always I'm going to go ahead and create a new folder here and as you can see that's obviously a Windows 11 folder you can right click on it you can go ahead and hit properties go to customize and click on change icon and then from there same thing you hit on browse go back to the folder we were at before open the dll file and then you can change this to whatever folder you want look like in this case we're just going to change it to a default folder hit OK and that'll give you a folder it looks more like Windows 7. now there should be a way to change all the default icons for instance like for all new folders and things of that nature and I researched it and I couldn't find a great way to do it at least not a free way to do it there's supposed to be a way you could edit the registry in order to change these folders and if you guys can find a you know a guide on how to do that then I would appreciate it I know some people mentioned it in the last video that I did on this subject and you know I looked around and I couldn't find a way to do that in the registry so if you know of a way let me know in the comments below because it'd be a great addition and I might actually make a video on just as topic alone let's get back to it okay so we're looking pretty close to Windows 7 but there's one glaring problem as you can see this is a Windows 11 background so we're gonna have to change that so for that we're going to go ahead and click back into our browser and then I actually found this image right here on Reddit and I'll go ahead and leave a link in the description below so you can download yourself but this essentially is a 4K version of the Windows 7 background so I'm going to right click we're going to hit save image as I'm going to throw this into my image folder right here and then from here we're going to right click on the desktop we're going to hit personalize we're going to go to backgrounds and then we're going to go to browse photos and we're going to pick the Windows 7 photo here and as you can see there you go that is a pretty good representation of windows 7. so I think I really nailed the Windows 7 look but this is not perfect unfortunately I just couldn't get the 3D accents on the Windows borders without using retail software now it is possible if you do it with Windows blinds but you got to pay 20 bucks for that however the whole point of these videos is to achieve the look for free and I think we got pretty close let me know what you guys think in the comments below and if you like these kind of mods then check out this playlist here I've done a ton of these videos and I'll probably do a lot more in the future I had someone ask me to make a Windows 11 look like Windows 3.1 video recently I may do that as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 143,120

Keywords: windows 7, windows 11, windows 10, how to make windows 11 look like windows 7 for free, aero glass in windows 11, aero glass for windows 11, aero glass for windows 10, windows 7 theme for windows 11, this is NOT windows 7

Id: e2jkSeqOmEw

Length: 24min 24sec (1464 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 19 2023