I'm looking for a theme that is more than just a neet bar and a nice background. I'm looking for something that completley changes the looks over everything. For examle, I don't want my windows looking like windows, so that the close, maximize, and minize buttons are differnt.
I've downloaded two or three that appear to do what I'm thinking in thier previews, but they don't change the looks of indiviual windows when I actually install them.
I'm not sure if I'm missing something, perhaps faling to load a module somewhere, or what.
if this makes sense, then let me know if you can help me!
uh, yeah. you're missing something. no litestep theme or module will, or even can (yet, at least), change the appearance of windows. for that, you need style xp, windowblinds, or some other similar program.
I think you think wrong, LS is ONLY for changing your desktop, what you mean is a window skin program like shellWM or WindowBlinds.
shellwm:
http://shellwm.sourceforge.net/
windowblinds:
http://www.windowblinds.net/
I tried windowblinds, but was not satisfied with it's performance. Does sheel wm run better and use less system resources?
I've never tried it, so I couldn't say. However, the current windowblinds version (4.0), is supposed to be less of a resource hog. is that the version you tried?
I'm not sure; I tried it about 6 months ago. I had it, object desktop, and icon packager running at the same time, and I could't run anything like PhotoShop.
sorry, I meant to say I've never tried shellwm.
Yeah, that's what I understood. I just was not impressed with it at all, especially since it's not open source (Windowblinds, I mean!)
ShellWM is still a beta version, but it runs very good with less resources, but, it's beta so there could be bugs. and you realy have to read the files, especially the window exclusions!!!
oh and it is free, and I think this is the most important thing ;)
Yeah, I downloaded it, and tried it on my laptop. It loads all kinds of other IBM ThinkPad garbage at startup, so my resources were down to 73, but I'm going to play around with it a little bit. Thanks for the advice!
You should get the uxtheme.dll hack\patch. It does the same thing but no resource hogging and it automatically skins scrollbars for free :-) Do a google search for it, they have an executable that patches it for you. If you have any more questions just ask.
I downloaded ShellWM, and it did what I wanted it to do, but it shot the resources through the roof! I guess since it's just in beta there is still quite a bit of work to do on it.
Enlighten me with a few more details about this uxtheme.dll. Will it allow you to skin themes to it as well, or does it only allow for one theme?
uxtheme.dll is a file in windows xp that verifies that your visual styles have microsofts digital signature. Of course all the cool ones dont. So basically what windowblinds and style xp do is hack this dll and make it so you dont need a digital signature to set themes. Downloading this dll by itself will let you skin scrollbars, windows etc without having to install style xp or windowblinds. Ive only been able to get it to work with style xp themes which is great and theres no resource loss at all. Do a google search and you can probably learn even more.
I guess the only problem there is that I don't run XP. I run 98SE.
You could also try eFX, Illuminatoin, or Custom Eyes.
Correction on the windowblinds/uxtheme.dll issue: Windowblinds actually intercepts the graphics calls and redirects 'em to files predefined in a skin package. This means it'll run on ANY Windows variety, whereas the uxtheme.dll hack will only apply to XP systems (and also violates your license agreement)
however, windowblinds doesn't run as well on non-xp/2k systems. it'll run, don't get me wrong, it'll just more resources, as it's somewhat geared towards the newer OS's.
that's food for though. I loaded windowblinds trials a few months agon, and was very unhappy with the performance. It's been kind of the same way recently with shellwm. When I load shellwm, my resources immediatly go down to 73% or lower. When I unload it, they go back. Since I know that it was developed from customeyes, I'm kind of nervouse about using that, but there again, I don't know anything about eFX or Illumination.
i've tried them both and if you think shellwm is buggy then don't use 'em. they caused too much trouble for me at least.
It's kind of funny like that. WindowBlinds skins so many different elements of the UI, with all sorts of added functionality, but on my system it still comes out with the same resource usage as ShellWM, which pretty much just skins window borders. Just got WB4 for W2K, and although it's using 4-5megs of my memory, it actually blits faster on some applications (!?!) The only time it seems to slow anything down is when it's on the config screen. Stardock will probably open up version 4 for Me/98/95 users in the next couple of months.
Well, what I was going to ask you all is what kind of machines you are running. I'm currently running a PII/266 with about 450mb or RAM. I know I need to upgrade, I just doin't have the funds. However, what I was wondering is if running a P4 1Ghz or faster has a better effect with skinning/shell replacement software than what I'm haging.
Perhaps that is why I haven't had great luck with WB, or even litestep.