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Win 7s Odd system of saving duplicate themes?


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#1 OFFLINE   Sys_Eng

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Posted 18 February 2010 - 11:04 AM

I am still a happy XP user, but I was reading the ideosyncratic way that Win 7 saves multiple copies of themes ("Prevent Win7 from saving duplicate themes" via http://windowssecrets.com/links/wg50tsx91m...F%3Fn%3Dstory1)

That made me realise that there could potentially be an extreamly useful option for deleting files in a selected folder - How about an option that would delete all files in a folder EXCEPT for the most recent one? This would solve the duplicate themes problem in Win 7 by simply adding the folder and enabling this option. It would have lots of other uses though, such as removing old back-ups automatically, just saving the most recent one.

Just a thought.

#2 OFFLINE   Ishi

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Posted 18 February 2010 - 01:00 PM

Duplicate themes??? Never heard of them. I use Windows 7 and it has pre-made themes and I do not save custom ones. As long as you don't save custom themes, I don't think there is anything to worry about duplicate themes. Windows 7 is by far the best operating system by Microsoft and clearly, the link shows solutions to some annoyances.
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#3 OFFLINE   Sys_Eng

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Posted 18 February 2010 - 01:25 PM

Hi Ishi,

Thank you for responding, but if you could read the article I posted the link to, to see if you read it the same way I do? You apparently do not have to save the theme manually to have it save, as it auto-saves as a new theme every time you change the wallpaper, screensaver, or whatever. If you often change something, you could end up with quite a list of them apparently.

Potential embarassment even, if your friends see that you once had a screensaver of a cuddly kitten or someone loaded an embarassing picture of you at a party as a wallpaper?

#4 OFFLINE   JDPower

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Posted 18 February 2010 - 11:11 PM

I could see a lot of users complaining about all their custom themes going missing if this was added to CCleaner.

#5 OFFLINE   Sys_Eng

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Posted 19 February 2010 - 12:10 AM

View PostJDPower, on Feb 18 2010, 11:11 PM, said:

I could see a lot of users complaining about all their custom themes going missing if this was added to CCleaner.

I agree totally of course! I was suggesting that "keep only the most recent" could be a good option to add to cleaning files. That way you could use it for keeping only the current theme IF YOU WISHED by selecting the folder where the custom themes are kept. I thought it much more likely it would be useful for deleting old back ups for example, as I said in my post also.

#6 OFFLINE   Ishi

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Posted 19 February 2010 - 12:49 PM

I have looked through the exact folder where themes are kept C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Themes and the only theme I see in there is named "Custom" and I did not see anything that could resemble any themes that were made before since I never save custom themes and name them.

However, there is an annoying situation for wallpapers. If you right click a picture on a web page and set it as desktop background, it saves this somewhere in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft which is not very easy to navigate into. I believe that this should be kept in the Pictures folder instead of this hard-to locate area. I am aware of this so I never directly set images on web pages as desktop backgrounds. I always go to the Control Panel>All Control Panel Items>Personalization>Desktop Background and then choose a folder where multiple images are kept and set them as a slideshow as my wallpaper.

If you open Windows Explorer, then right click an image there to set as desktop background, the same thing happens, however a duplicate of the image is again saved somewhere in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft. Even if you delete the original image that you once right clicked and set as desktop background via Windows Explorer, the duplicate image is still there.

One solution is to make a desktop shortcut for C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Themes so that you have quick access to this folder and manually delete older themes that are automatically saved in there.


However, I believe this is a good idea.
I love computer maintenance tasks.
Some of my favorite programs:
Wordpad -basic word processing
Notepad - temporary clipboard and basic scripting module
Windows Media Player 12- video, music and online radio player
Windows Media Center - live TV, local FM radio
CCleaner- handy computer maintenance tool

If something fails to work after using the registry cleaner, use SYSTEM RESTORE.