Using Desktop Themes from Around the World

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated May 9, 2016)

3

Do you long to see the world? (At least from your desktop?) Windows provides a wide variety of desktop themes that span the globe. When you first install Windows, you inform it of your locality. This information is used to configure the operating system for things like time and date formats, currency defaults, etc. One thing it also is used for is to load a set of desktop themes that are unique to that locale.

Normally these are not available to you, but there is a way you can get to them. All you need to do is open an Explorer window and navigate to this location:

C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT

The directory contains (at least on my Windows 7 system) 15 folders, each for a separate country. The countries are not all English-speaking, but you can figure out from the two-letter codes in the folder names which countries they represent:

  • MCT-AU: Australia
  • MCT-BR: Brazil
  • MCT-CA: Canada
  • MCT-DE: Germany
  • MCT-ES: Spain
  • MCT-FR: France
  • MCT-GB: Great Britain
  • MCT-IT: Italy
  • MCT-JP: Japan
  • MCT-MX: Mexico
  • MCT-NL: Netherlands
  • MCT-PL: Poland
  • MCT-TR: Turkey
  • MCT-US: United States
  • MCT-ZA: South Africa

Open the folder for a country of interest, and you'll see a set of subfolders. One of them, Theme, contains the desktop theme for that country. If you double-click that theme file, it installs a shortcut to the theme and wallpapers in the Personalization area of the Control Panel. You can then use the themes as you would any other themes to change what you see on your desktop.

 This tip (7098) applies to Windows 7.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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What is two more than 9?

2016-10-27 03:43:40

Jo

I cant download this themes

2016-05-09 07:37:04

arnold12

I have only MCT-NL: Netherlands on my Toshiba W7x64 laptop. I don't think it's not valuable to search any farther.

2016-05-09 06:28:24

Shreepad S M Gandhi

Thanks Allen. Did not know this. Tried it. I had 5 countries on my office machine.
Good.
Thanks again for sharing.

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