If you are using windows 7 or windows 8 and would like to tweak your operating system to customize and personalize to your tastes then you can try changing the background of your taskbar. In this tweak we are going to add a custom image as background to taskbar and because of the transparency in the aero theme we can see the image behind the taskbar. However the aero theme has been disabled in windows 8 but there is transparency to set an image. There is also a tweak through which you can enable the aero theme in windows8.
The program that we are going to use now is Taskbar Color Effects. It is developed by Lee Whittington for The Windows Club. Though it was developed initially for Windows 7 it works fine for Windows 8 but needs .NET framework 3.5 to be installed on your PC.
1. Download the program from here and open “Taskbar Color Effects.exe” as administrator.
2. Now you can see that there is “Taskbar Color Effects” icon on your system tray, double click it to open “Taskbar Color Effects”.
3. Now you must be seeing an application as shown in the above screenshot, You have varied options to customize your taskabar like changing the color of the taskbar and background image of it.
4. you can have a custm background image by clicking on “Custom Image bg” on the screen. You can either repeat, stretch or center the background image.
5. You can also set the transparency of the application customizations using “color transparency” and you can add shadow as well to the taskbar.
6. The only limitation is that the application should be running for its changes to take place, As soon as you exit the application your changes will be lost.
Hope you liked it.
Note : This application is primarily designed for windows 7 but works with windows 8 as well .
