Downloads

Tired of the glitz and glamour of your brand-new OS? Bring it back to the good old days with our Commodore 64 theme for Windows 7.

Way back in the Mesozoic period of computing (also known as the early '80s), we didn't have slick little netbooks or big, powerful desktops. Businesses generally had UNIX servers or ancient mainframes driving terminals at users' workstations. Home users had a choice of a few systems that bore little resemblance to the array of computers for sale today, and one of the most popular models was the beloved Commodore 64.

The makers of the C-64 included a hard-coded copy of BASIC right on its internal ROM so you wouldn't have to boot from a 5 1/4" floppy diskette like most PCs. The machine had a generous 64 kilobytes of memory, and you loaded programs into it from a tape drive--eventually to be superseded by a painfully slow floppy disk drive (the legendary 1541).

This theme pack recreates the look of a C-64, only on a slightly newer platform: Windows 7. It contains three backgrounds that give an authentic look at the familiar old C-64 screen. It also has desktop icons for your User folder (a miniature C-64 screen); your my Computer link (a C-64 computer), and Recycle Bin (that 1541 floppy drive--the green LED illuminates when the Recycle Bin contains something). The Window colors recreate the beige C-64 casing, and the System font should look familiar to any C-64 user.

It's easy enough to install--just download the .THEMEPACK file, double-click on it, ignore any scary Windows 7 alerts (we promise, this file is innocuous), and let it fly. The theme doesn't contain any sound because unless you actually told the Commodore 64 to make noise, it was a pretty quiet machine.

Make sure your Computer, User and Recycle Bin icons are visible when applying the theme.

--Joel Durham Jr.