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View Full Version : The effect of "Themes" on the stability of Windows


OC
10-11-2002, 10:48 AM
I haven't played with Themes since early in the Win98 days. My experience then was that Themes slowed things down a bit and made Windows less stable. So, you Win2k and XP users, what is your experience with Themes? Good? Bad?

tia

-OC
Cantacuzene
10-11-2002, 11:56 AM
Depends.

Windows XP is teh best for themes. 2k and 9x have only a tiny bit of memory allocated to gui. Not to mention they don't have very good kinning software to work with.

XP has a much higher amount of memory devoted to GUI meaning no lag unless the skin author purposely makes the bitmaps too big. However, it all depends on the prog you use. Windowblinds sucks ass because it literally skins the OS. So you have the normal GUI memory devoted and memory for windowblinds. If you dont have much ram on your comp its a problem. I recommend StyleXP just because it uses the built in windows xp skinning engine rather than its own, so it uses no extra memory.

Get Style XP @ www.tgtsoft.com
Get skins for it at www.themexp.org
Tommy Boomfiger
10-12-2002, 06:20 PM
i think that oc is talking about different types of themes. 98 didnt the same GUI options as xp does. the themes in 98 were just collections of wallpapers, sounds, icons, colors, fonts and screensavers. they did end up being unstable, but that was due to crappy coding, specifically in the program that would change the themes for you. also all the themes that ms provided had the wallpapers in jpg or gif format while 95 would only accept bmp. therefore the theme application would change it to bmp format. that was never changed in plus for 98. now, you could have done all this manually without any problems, though most sounds people substituted for the default ones were considerably larger which caused system slowdown.

as far as skinning in xp goes, stylexp works just fine. the only extra resources it uses are for the program itself. after you have changed the skin to your liking you can close the program and set it to not load at startup. from there it uses the same resources the xp used for any of its skins, whether you use the "candy" skins or the 2k style skins.
ArkiStan
10-13-2002, 05:09 AM
Originally posted by chosenfool
im using styleXP, and the system is very stable - almost has no resources used ...

what's this StyleXP? Where can I get it? Is it freeware?
Cantacuzene
10-13-2002, 08:26 AM
Link is two posts up. :rolleyes: