Advanced Appearance Settings For Windows 8.1

It’s a well known fact that Microsoft has removed tens of handy features from Windows 8 operating system. Start menu, Explorer toolbar (command bar), DVD playback, desktop gadgets, Aero glass transparency, Windows classic theme, and advanced appearance settings are some of the features missing from Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

While it’s possible to get most of the above mentioned features with the help of third-party utilities, there is no tool available to get the Advanced Appearance Settings in Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

In Windows 7 and previous versions of Windows, we could customize window color and appearance settings via Advanced Appearance Settings. The Advanced Appearance Settings (Window Color and Appearance in Windows 7) dialog would allow us to change the appearance of title bar, window border, application background, caption buttons, desktop, disabled item, hyperlink, icon, icon spacing, menu, scrollbar, tooltip, window, message box, and palette title.

For some reason, Microsoft has removed Advanced Appearance Settings from Windows 8 as well as Windows 8.1 update. Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 include only options to change the text size of title bars, menus, message boxes, palette boxes, icons and tooltips. Users who would like to change the appearance of above mentioned items without the help of third-party tools need to manually open and edit Registry values.

Luckily, developers and Windows enthusiasts have released tools to get some of the settings present in Advanced Appearance Settings in Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

A couple of months ago, we reviewed tools to change the window border size in Windows 8/8.1 and also a tool to change the default spacing of icons on the desktop. This time around, we introduce you to a new tool designed to bring many advanced appearance settings to Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

Advanced Appearance Settings is a portable utility designed to help you personalize the appearance of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 by changing the size of caption buttons, window border, border padding, icon, vertical icon spacing, horizontal icon spacing, menus and scroll buttons.

Using this free tool is extremely simple. Launch the tool, select a new size of an item and click Apply button.

We suggest you create a manual system restore point before making changes to the default values so that you can restore the original values with a few mouse clicks.

The only catch is that only MSFN forum members can download this program as of now. If you like this tool, you need to sign-up (free) to MSFN board in order to download this little program. We will update this article once the developer uploads the software to file sharing sites.

Download Advanced Appearance Settings