Sure, you can hack Windows and install a custom theme if you really wanted to, or pay for a software package to do it for y'all. What you might non know is that yous tin can use a giddy trick to change the color of the taskbar with no added software—without changing your window colour.

What we'll be doing to perform this crawly pull a fast one on is changing the color of the wallpaper paradigm… the Taskbar is translucent, right? That's exactly what makes this trick piece of work. We'll too quickly walk through the Windows way of doing it, for the beginners in the crowd.

Beginner Method: Change Aero Colors Across the Board

Windows vii actually makes it fairly easy to change the colors of the window borders, start menu, and the taskbar… and while that'southward not exactly what we're talking about, we'll quickly evidence the beginners how to do it. Correct-click on the background and choose Personalize from the carte du jour…

And so at the bottom of the window, choose the Window Color link.

And then you tin can change the colour of the windows, which will also slightly change the colour of the taskbar. If you really want the color to alter, you uncheck the choice for transparency, though it will ruin the whole Aero translucent awesomeness factor.

Now that we take that out of the manner, let's move on to the fun office…

The Geeky and Fun Method of Changing the Taskbar Colour

The secret to irresolute the taskbar color is to change the desktop wallpaper and add a colored stripe at the bottom right in back of where the taskbar is. For this practice, we're going to illustrate with the freeware Paint.Net application, only you lot could do the same with any image editor.

Before we begin, make admittedly certain that your wallpaper is the aforementioned dimensions as your desktop. This won't work very well otherwise.

The easiest style to put a stripe at the bottom of the image is to use the Canvas Size feature to chop off the bottom of the prototype, so add information technology back. You lot could mess around with the rectangle selection tool if you actually wanted to, but most of the fourth dimension this will end upward being quicker.

The Windows 7 taskbar is 48 pixels high in the default style, though it might exist larger depending on which options y'all have set—you could e'er have a screenshot and check for yourself.

Decrease that 48 pixels from the height of the wallpaper, and make sure that the Anchor is set to the Pinnacle and in the center, as the mouse pointer in the screenshot below should evidence.

At present simply utilize the Canvas Size tool again, and set information technology dorsum to the original size—my desktop is 1920×1200, so this wallpaper is going to work out perfectly for me.

At this bespeak yous'll see a white stripe beyond the lesser of the image, which is perfect for the paint bucket tool. Choose a color, and drop it on there.

For illustration purposes, we'll utilise a horribly green color, and then relieve the image—if yous are using Paint.Cyberspace, make sure to choose a new filename, considering it defaults to the aforementioned one!

At present go and assign that image as your wallpaper… you'll see the taskbar has completely inverse.

This also works specially well when you lot have a low-cal-colored background every bit your wallpaper, and you want a very dark taskbar without making everything dark.

And thus we have learned the very stupid geek trick behind irresolute the Taskbar color. Bask!