Desktop Architect - A Complete Customization Tool for Windows 9x (Overview & Demo)

Today we're checking out Desktop Architect - a customization tool for Windows from the late '90s!

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● Music/Credits:
Background Music:
"Ersatz Bossa" from the YouTube Audio Library

Outro Music: Silent Partner - Bet On It
Source: YouTube Audio Library

Some materials in this video are used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, which allows "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, and research.

#MichaelMJD #Windows98 #Microsoft

[NoahClevinger]

Weekends are always better with a brand new Michael MJD video.

[JessicaFEREM]

You could use Desktop Architect to make a dark and light theme for windows and use the scheduler to change it.
that's something you couldn't really do until Auto Dark mode a few years ago, but this program was doing it back on windows 9x

[Tsaukpaetra]

This program enabled Windows' flat UI before Microsoft designers ever came up with the idea!

[philtkaswahl]

That Mario desktop background made everything so much better.

[usmansm]

Windows 95/98 and even XP were such fun times. I was a kid back then and had a blast with new themes, sounds, wallpapers etc. It seemed so surreal at that time, as if your PC was alive. Now OS have gone really basic/corporate style and its quite boring.

[tinfoil]

Back in the 90's: "Ohh a file named Cool Theme.exe, I'm running THAT!" :) Awesome video.

[KatJustice]

Imagine using the scheduler to set your theme to change with the time of day to reflect the sun. Morning it's kind of a rose gold, mid-day it's a warm, friendly blue, late afternoon it's a bold orange, twilight it's a cool purple, and during the night it's a dark navy or black theme. UGH makes me wish I was cognizant during the early 2000s

[ChloeKenobi]

Omg the mario art wallpaper!!! My favorite MJD lore piece

[alisharifian]

I like the way icon designers have consensus on what a "Theme" icon should look like:a speaker, a palette and a capital "A".There are some other options, like a brush and a monitor. You can add salt and pepper to the recipe at will.

[CoTeCiOtm]

Dude, I remember some years ago I was looking into the possibility of changing some of the 3D element colours in Win9x since I knew it was possible to change, since some of the high contrast themes do alter the 3D element colours, and you can't tweak them at all within Windows. I'm grabbing this straight away, it looks like such a fun program to mess around!

[intelDX]

I remember from the the late 90-s (98/99) That I so in my school one Windows 95 PC (486 ma by) with inverted 3D elements 11:05
I was so amazed how it was done, and all those years I was wondering, now I know :D

[aytowastaken]

That program looks pretty awesome, might mess around with it in a VM someday!

[GBlastMan]

I think the BSOD was because you opened explorer while a Desktop Architect was kinda messing with the sys files in real time, and the system kinda freaked out because those files were being used at two exact points at the same time which is a no no for system files.

Ok kinda searched about this error and its because "bad memory" but i think that also reffers to when windows tries to use something from memory but its attempting to use it from a place that cant be accesed or like when memory gets leaked and therefore causes a system halt, and i think here is because a program is calling sys files to be previewed somewhere else while you are accesing to explorer that also is trying to call said memory sector where the file for that particular thing is stored so it kinda "overlaps" on itself and causes the BSOD because you cant be having the same file being accesible by 2 different applications at the same time.

[rjsmith]

I miss the era of being able to customize windows.

[RetroGamerOG_]

I just noticed the new camera quality!

[pianokeyjoe]

Amazing how much I loved to customize Windows with Litestep and Windowblinds back in the day when I could not use LINUX for everything, but wanted Windows to Look like Unix or Linux graphical environments but still use my favorite music and photo manipulation apps that only worked in Windows. Ahh, memories 😀. I never actually heard of or saw this app in my almost daily searches for shells, and icon changers, and so on back in 2000-2001. Now that I see this in 2023 I see it is far more powerful than just using Stardock on top of Windows. But.. Now I have Linux that does everything Windows does and more.. so why use this anymore than for purely nostalgic reasons? Then again, is not nostalgia, a good enough reason? Questions to ponder I reckon.

[CesareVesdani]

That's a very interesting desktop application.

[BionicTenshi]

Didn't know 3D settings could be customized like that, i used before a program called Hook99 that allowed having flat buttons in the taskbar but didn't know it could be done on the whole system.
A feature that could've been cool is changing the colours used in the scheme to somewhat match the wallpaper, like Win8 did to some extent, but i guess that's too advanced.

[MichaelEKaz]

I like the image used in File Explorer when you installed the later version. That’s a neat way to enhance a theme.

[ste]

Very cool, Wish windows came with options like that and all grouped together