Style Xp

During a momentary lapse of reason I used it for about 20 minutes one day. I felt cheap and dirty and so I removed it and immediately took a shower using a pad of steel wool.

/me hoses motion down with a bacterial disinfectant...

Couldn't bring myself to waste the money, time, and/or effort....

I use it and Wb about 50/50. Obviously there are many, many more Wb skins available, but there are a few msstyles that I love and must use regularly.

/me puts motion in a quarantine chamber for a while

I use StyleXp, because I don't like the way Windowblinds 'builds' itself on the windows. I like it to be in one piece when I log on.

With StyleXp, everything is in place as soon as I log on.

Yeah I know it picky, but what the hey.

Once that's fixed...maybe I'll go back.

Chris.

WindowBlinds is the same way. It's skinned right when you logon.

You can lose your skin if your system is really taxed, though. On a slow system like mine, occasionally the classic window will show through. Perhaps that's what he's talking about. That's certainly not enough to make me stop using WB, though.

Frogboy/Tarkus : I'll have a revist then. It always seemed to take three seconds or so, seeing the classic/luna look briefly before. (That was on Win2k though last time I tried,)

Maybe it's because of other things loading [Zonealarm / Norton / Popup stopper / actual title buttons / then Xp 'services' of course]

I haven't a slow system, so it isn't because of that. I'll see how it goes.



Chris

I've contradicted my self there.

I used it frequently on Win2k, seeing the classic look briefly onload.
I've used it once maybe on winXp, seeing the luna look briefly. Then unloaded it straight away.

I'll give 3.4 a try.

/me trys to think before typing, often failing.

i uselly use it, but not at this moment

I reloaded 3.3 yesterday, but I couldn't even get the dang thing to load on startup. What the monkey's up with WB. I swear the used to be a little tick box.

or was that on Win2k?

I even tried putting wbload.exe in my startup folder to no avail.

So yet again I went back to StyleXP.

I'll try 3.4 tonight though,
>

If You use the unregistered shareware version, it won't load at startup...

Bah. It used to on win2k.

Ok, so the registered version of 3.4, will act [visually] EXACTLY like style XP?

will I see it 'build' the bitmaps on top on start up, or will it all be there nice and ready to go?

[Thanks for the responses]

/me reaches for his wallet.....

I've never noticed it build on startup, but again, occasionally when my rather slow system with a PCI video card is really maxed out, I will lose the skins briefly. YMMV.

Using 3.4 with XP , processor is Intel P4 at 2.2 Ghtz. I never see it 'build' the bitmaps, it's instant, ready to go the split second I log on.

Actually WindowBlinds is vastly more advanced than msstyles (Style XP doesn't skin anything, it just hacks out the digital signing protection on msstyles). WB will skin virtually all your apps whereas msstyles can only skin "theme aware" apps fully.

It's just will not do nearly "enough" for me. If you just want another color other than blue, green, or silver then fine give it try. I need more!

Thanks Tarkus, Motion, Frogboy. I don't get Bill's response , but cheers anyhow.

I can't wait til payday

Chris.

/me cries over rejected wallpaper submission.......

[I love smilies ]

I had used WB since build 0.9 - but when I got a Win XP PC, I started using StyleXP, and I actually don't even have WB installed anymore. (I use the rest of the Object Desktop stuff, though.) Style XP seems to be *quite* a bit more stable. I used WB on a couple of different PCs over the last two years, and there were always some minor glitches. I don't seem to get those now.

CIAO!!

Chris, I was a bit brief. The basic deal is that Windows XP Style that comes with XP offers three colors to choose from: A Blue, Green, and Silver. They all look rather similar. Microsoft decided when developing XP to not allow 3rd party skins to use their skinning mechanism due to stability problems during development. Therefore they digitally locked the .dll that controls it. StyleXP replaces that .dll to allow access to the MS skinning mechanism. So when you use StyleXP you are just allowing your machine to load a different color variation to Luna. A StyleXP skin is limited to skinning exactly what Luna is capable of, which is really not that much when comnpared to WB. WB is much more robust in how it can change a window. For example buttons do not have to be located at top left, windows do not need to be rectangular, plugins can be added. The list goes on much further. Basically WB offers a much wider range of options to the artist.

Then we could get into whether it is legal to break the copy protection MS put in place, but that will have to wait for another day.

Hope this helps clarify my feelings on the matter.

I use visual styles from time to time (but I DO NOT use StylesXP.) They've got nothing on WB in terms of features and the extent to which it can skin the system. The only "edge" visual style sstill havew is that they can skin the special XP menu in the folders.

The quality of the skins seems to be much higher in the WB camp, as well