Sure, y'all tin can hack Windows and install a custom theme if you actually wanted to, or pay for a software package to practice it for y'all. What you might not know is that you can use a silly trick to change the color of the taskbar with no added software—without changing your window color.

What we'll exist doing to perform this crawly play a joke on is irresolute the color of the wallpaper paradigm… the Taskbar is translucent, correct? That'due south exactly what makes this flim-flam work. We'll too speedily walk through the Windows way of doing it, for the beginners in the crowd.

Beginner Method: Alter Aero Colors Across the Board

Windows 7 really makes it fairly easy to change the colors of the window borders, start menu, and the taskbar… and while that's not exactly what we're talking most, we'll apace show the beginners how to do it. Correct-click on the background and cull Personalize from the menu…

Then at the lesser of the window, choose the Window Color link.

And then you tin change the color of the windows, which will too slightly alter the color of the taskbar. If you lot actually desire the color to change, y'all uncheck the pick for transparency, though it will ruin the whole Aero translucent awesomeness cistron.

Now that we have that out of the way, let's move on to the fun part…

The Geeky and Fun Method of Changing the Taskbar Color

The secret to changing the taskbar color is to change the desktop wallpaper and add a colored stripe at the bottom right in dorsum of where the taskbar is. For this practise, we're going to illustrate with the freeware Paint.Net application, but you could do the aforementioned with any image editor.

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

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

The Windows vii taskbar is 48 pixels high in the default mode, though it might be larger depending on which options you have set—you could always take a screenshot and cheque for yourself.

Subtract that 48 pixels from the height of the wallpaper, and make sure that the Anchor is fix to the Pinnacle and in the middle, as the mouse arrow in the screenshot below should evidence.

Now simply apply the Canvas Size tool once again, and set it back to the original size—my desktop is 1920×1200, so this wallpaper is going to piece of work out perfectly for me.

At this point yous'll run across a white stripe across the bottom of the prototype, which is perfect for the paint saucepan tool. Choose a color, and drop it on in that location.

For illustration purposes, we'll utilise a horribly greenish colour, and then save the image—if you are using Pigment.Internet, make sure to choose a new filename, considering information technology defaults to the same one!

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

This also works especially well when yous have a low-cal-colored background equally 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!