Desktop Customization: How to customize the Windows 8 Charm Bar

Windows 8 is easy to customize. Here’s how you would customize the Charm Bar

Microsoft brought Windows 8 along with many major and minor changes over its predecessor. The main difference becomes the Metro UI and Ribbon Interface which makes the user experience even better than Windows 8. The Windows Charm bar is a production of this Metro UI. If you move your mouse cursor to the right side of your computer screen, you will see a pretty good looking bar present there, this is the Charm Bar. You can also see this if you press Windows + C.

The Windows Charm Bar targets to give the user a quick access to many items for betterment of user experience. Now you may be thinking about customizing this Charm Bar and use your own set of icons in the place of default icons. In order to do so, follow the steps given below carefully.

1. First you have to download an third party application “My WCP Charm Bar Customizer”, which can be freely downloaded from this link. With the help of this application,
you can easily customize the Charm Bar according to your need.

2. Now after opening this application, you will see the screen shown below.

3. You have two options here to customize your Charm bar:

1. Browse and select your favourite icons to replace the default ones and

2. Edit the UI file of the Charm bar.

Now if you follow the first method and don’t want to bother about those lines of codes, you have to click on the picture you want to change and then browse the location of that icon.

If you want to edit the UI file, then click on Edit UI.

then edit the UI file according to your need.

After successful editing save that file and finally you will see the screen with the icons of your choice like this.

4. Now click on Apply New Settings to apply the settings.

You can switch to the default icons anytime, by clicking on Restore Default Settings.