Windows – Google Chrome changed Title Bar Color – Does not inherit correct color from Windows Classic Theme

I don't know of any source for color packs, but the colors for window borders are just saved as registry values, which you can edit yourself. Export HKCU\Control Panel\Colors from an account on an XP machine with the colors you want, then import that registry file on your windows 7 box. Log out then back in, and it should be set to those colors.

Regarding your defense of Windows Classic though, I must disagree. I used the classic themes on XP almost always, because Luna was, well, hideous. But I'm curious - what kind of graphics card do you have? My computer here has Intel integrated graphics 945GM, the oldest, crappiest integrated graphics chip which runs aero. Everything is completely smooth. Also, they do include some themes, quite a few of them in fact. You can change the colors, backgrounds, etc. as you wish. As for battery, that's true, but you can set it to disable transparency when running on battery, which gives much better battery life. I've found that the benefits aero brings far outweigh its supposed ugliness... being able to preview which window I'm switching to, the images on the taskbar, the see-through Alt-Tab, etc. are all quite helpful features, in my opinion.

But anyhow, each to his own. Hopefully that'll help with getting your theme set up the way you'd like... after all, we should each use what we like best, not what some random guy on the internet says he likes ;)

Short answer: disabling XP themes definitely increases system performance and reduces the memory load.

Longer answer: Themes are basically a collection of graphic images that are drawn to the display buffer instead of using the older logic of using solid colors and lines. Because these themes often require resizing and/or tiling (and in newer incarnations: animation), there is a lot more work going on to display the graphic element for a button vs. the work necessary to draw the button using the older logic.

The amount of the performance increase is debatable and I would imagine it to be highly variable upon your system's CPU, memory, and a few other factors that are probably negligible (such as video drivers and video memory -- is it shared or on the video card). Although there is (in XP) no acceleration going on, there is still work that has to be done to transmit the image to the video card, and so the drivers would have some small part to play.

On systems with lesser memory resources and/or those with slower processors switching to the classic theme will definitely help out since there is no requirement to store or draw the theme graphics. On systems with more memory and faster processes, the performance increase will be less noticeable.

For current day systems, it almost always boils down to personal preference; a current machine should not show significant gains (or losses) using either mode. One from the XP era, however, will almost certainly show gains in Classic mode.