Windows 8 Charms Bar Customizer

Posted March 8, 2012 – 1:02 pm in: Freeware, Windows 8 Guides

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Microsoft has introduced hundreds of new features in Windows 8 operating system. One of them is Charms Bar. Charms Bar, a small bar which can be accessed by moving mouse cursor to the upper or lower right corner of the screen, lets you quickly access system commands such as settings, search, share, devices and also lets you quickly switch to the Start screen.

One can also reveal the Charms Bar by sliding the finger from right-edge of screen (on touch screen) or by using Windows + C hotkey. Unlike other Metro features, Charms Bar is not visually impressive. First, icons used for Search, Share, Start, Devices, and Settings could have been better and second, that (black) background color is doesn’t look good too.

Enter Charms Bar Customizer! A free tool (from the maker of Windows 8 Start Screen Customer) to customize Windows 8 Charms Bar with a few mouse clicks. It lets you customize the Charms Bar by replacing the default icons, background color, text color, hover icons and color transparency.

With the help of Charms Bar Customizer, you can replace icons used for Search, Share, Start, Devices, and Settings with custom ones. Custom icon size must in 86×86 pixels and should be in PNG, JPG, BMP, ICO or TIFF format. You can also personalize Charms Bar background color, icon hover background color, icons pressed background color, text color and text hover color.

Additionally, options are available to disable Charms hint, disable hover wash, disable logo smoothing, and disable wash.

Using Charms Bar Customizer is fairly simple. Download and run the tool with admin rights, make changes and finally click on apply new settings button. Tool will automatically restart the explorer to apply changes. To revert to the default, click on restore original settings button.

Note that Windows SmartScreen may warn you against launching the program. Simply click Run anyway button to run the program. Charms Bar Customizer works fine on both x86 and x64 versions of Windows 8. We tested it on our x64 machine and can confirm that it works flawlessly. We recommend you create a system restore point before making any changes to system files.

The link provided to download this software is in French language. So, visit the page and then click on “Telecharger” button (see the below picture) to download Charms Bar Customizer.