Windows Vista sports a cool look and so does Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista. If you are bored with your old XP Yahoo Messenger look here is a simple way how you can make it look like the Yahoo Messenger in Windows Vista.

Yahoo Messenger like many other softwares allows users to customize the look and feel to suit your needs. All you need handy is a custom theme and follow the instructions below. I would demonstrate below how to customize the theme to the Yahoo Messenger Windows Vista-ish Skin which is how Yahoo Messenger looks on Windows Vista.

To start with the process, first you need to download the Vista messenger skin to your local PC. Choose anyone of those you like. Once you have downloaded the file unzip the contents into a folder, in my case I downloaded the files to C:\Downloads and unzipped the folder to C:\Downloads\YahooVistaSkin.

Once the downloading and unzipping process has been completed you need to add the Skin to your Yahoo Messenger to do that follow these steps

1. Open a Windows Explorer window to C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Shared\Graphics
2. Copy the Vista Skin folder from C:\Downloads\YahooVistaSkin to C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Shared\Graphics\YahooVistaSkin
3. Open Yahoo Messenger or double click it in the task bar if it already is open.
4. Click on the Messenger menu option and click on Change Skin as shown below.
     
5. You will see a new a new popup which allows you to choose between differnt skins choose the Vista skin, once you have done that click on Ok and close the dialog box. You should see the change in the skin immediately, if you did not like the skin you can easily roll back by following the steps above.
6. All done you now have a Yahoo Messenger on a XP PC that looks similar to a Yahoo Messenger on Windows Vista.

Please note you will have to replace C:\ in the above steps with the drive that Windows is installed in your computer.

I personally do not like Windows Vista and all my tips are without having using Windows Vista. If you have any comments all are most welcome.