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Ommoo Magic Desktop is a free tool for customizing the look of the Windows desktop. It not only manages your wallpaper but also your themes, cursors, and other visual style elements and even lets you create and save your own custom themes. It can change the look of your Windows PC, or crash it–your choice.

Magic Desktop’s simple but stylish interface features tabs along the top axis and buttons along the left-hand side bearing much the same labels: Theme, Wallpaper, Visual Style (Skin on the sidebar) Icon, and Cursor. The Tabs manage features, while the buttons access Web-based libraries of resources. The default theme appears in each tab until you add stuff, which we did by clicking themes and browsing through a considerable selection. We clicked on one, which opened a page of information as well as a download link. We downloaded our selection to Magic Desktop’s interface and applied it to our system. In this way we were able to choose our theme, wallpaper, and other elements from a truly extensive selection: 499 pages, 15 images per page of wallpaper alone. We were able to browse or search for a variety of images and add them to the Magic Desktop interface in the right-hand panel, which also offers searching, ranking, and tags. There’s one more tab on the interface, MySuits, which our experience with discount furniture stores led us to believe means “suites,” especially since it let us save our settings as a single suite, even if we mixed up various elements. Magic Desktop offers a few extras, most prominent among them a built-in download manager.

Magic Desktop’s selections are extensive, though they’re heavy with dramatic airbrushed images and Asian pop-culture themes; for instance, the Holidays selection favors Chinese holidays, Western Zodiac signs, and Christmas, with some Halloween themes thrown in. More critically, the program worked well enough in a 32-bit version of Vista but crashed in a 64-bit version of Windows 7 and wouldn’t function even after we reinstalled it. We have to conclude that Ommoo Magic Desktop’s appeal is limited.