TweakXPlorer

TweakXPlorer is a portable tool that you can use to customize the appearance of Windows Explorer in Windows XP. It features options for the Internet Explorer 6 toolbar and folder thumbnails, among others.

There is no installation involved, which makes the tool portable. This means that you can save the program files in a custom location on the hard drive and double-click the .exe to launch. It doesn't make any changes in your system registry.

When it comes to the interface, the utility opts for a standard window with a neatly organized layout, where you can separately make tweaks to the folders, toolbars and thumbnails.

It's possible to personalize the folder background by applying a favorite picture, change its colors, enable or disable safe mode (for folders on removable media devices), as well as integrate TweakXPlorer into the Windows Explorer right-click menu.

It's possible to set an image as the Explorer toolbar background (also affects Internet Explorer 6), resize it to fit the toolbar (101x96 pixels), apply a photo as the folder thumbnail in Windows Explorer, adjust the thumbnail size and picture quality, disable the thumbnail cache to favor disk space instead of loading speed, as well as restore settings to their default configuration if you change your mind.

TweakXPlorer is multilingual and executes user commands swiftly while remaining light on system resources. It used a low amount of CPU and RAM in our evaluation, so it didn't put a strain on the computer's performance during its runtime. No errors were displayed and it didn't hang or crash.

TweakXPlorer comes packed with straightforward and intuitive options for making some changes to the OS appearance in Windows XP.