I have just been reading about this excellent piece of software in the latest edition of Microsoft Windows XP magazine, and will be installing it when I get home.

A few quick questions.

I am thinking of installing the Portal theme. Does this work okay as far as everybody knows?

When I install the software will it affact the rest of my family who all have their own XP logon accounts? Is there any way that I can stop it from doing so? Can they change back to the default XP theme if they want to?

Thanks in advance.

No idea...never heard of it.

it can if you want it to but you can always disable that.

wait, hold on... litestep was mentioned in Ms Windows XP magazine??

That sounds very very unprobable and un-Microsoft to do. Just as if they want two million people to break their systems and blame it on them...

There is a two page article of it in the Christmas 2003 issue, on pages 74 & 75.

They give it a very good write-up.

Warma, are you saying that the software is crap? You said that people would break their systems if they load it?

No I'm not saying that the program is crap, if it were crap, it wouldn't be used. The normal Explorer shell is not bad and LS is much better.

I'm just saying that Litestep isn't very stable nor user-friendly. I just read a post where a person installed it and has a three-click way to chrash his machine every time. Heck, I myself witnessed a case where a clean setup from LS Installer on a perfectly normal machine produced something that simply did not work. Too many times I've seen something work somewhere and then, on another machine, bang.

Like I said, it isn't crap, but while this stuff continues to happen and people reinstall their systems in desperation, there's absolutely no way LS could be called a reliable or stable piece of software.

I have to admit that omar's installed and OTS have made things a lot more organized and nowadays you don't even have to understand anything of the Windows registry, but there's still work to be done before LS works on each of the machines it will be installed to.

In that case I think I'll give it a miss.

Thanks for the warning.

I'll also warn all the Windows XP magazine readers too.

LS is as stable as the buggiest module you load.

and as good as the configuration you (or the theme author) wrote

LS does work in every machine it is installed, if it's configured correctly you should have any problem at all. If there's a bug in ls it's because the themer didnt test his theme correctly.

I'll second that it is very strange to have something like LS hit any mainstream magazine, much less this one.

The new LS is unstable and generally doesn't work much because testing OTS2 themes is still a bit of a mystery (several themes having odd problems and th themer(s) not being able to recreate them, and several themes released more as testing than to really be used by people)...it'll iron itself out and soon there will lots of perfectly functional and stable OTS2 themes for the masses.

I've not had LS crash due to an issue with Litestep itself since one of the .24.5 betas. I'm just now getting to where I enjoy messing with it enough to try to polish my themes off to upload (unlike 3pixelbliss where I skipped the polishing bit), and haven't been too experimental until recently with it, but I've been using LS since the days when WinNT4 SP3 was modern, and have had no problems at all with stability since, I think it was .24.5b5.

cerbie: unstable? i only had one problem with it, with the 2.9.5 installer, that themes didnt get installed. but i love ots2, i always hated ots1, i liked to have a common module dir like in lsdistro, but without the cons of having only one version of the modules for every theme. i agree that themes need to learn how to make ots2 compatible themes (every detail is in the ots2 website), but that will happen in the next few months, there are already many functional ots2 themes availible.

I've had it crash with a few new OTS2 themes. One I had to log off before I could get anything done, one other crashed it, and at least one more just didn't load quite right.
...then I open the theme config files and see that there is still a lot left to do. I feel sure such themes will be practically non-existent in a couple of weeks.

I agree about common modules directories, but I'd just upgraded and decided to go back to litestep and found this new OTS1 thing. Very good when the last time I bothered checking for modules or themes or pretty much anything (I'd just gotten back to having a decent gaming rig), a given theme was an entire LS install unto itself. Now I'm converting my near-done theme to OTS2 (it works, but only with the settings for size and position I use daily for modules) and completely redoing how options are set in it, as I got too carried away initially.

cerbie: that has nothing to do with OTS2 though, the problem there is that the themers didn't test out their theme well enough. I've been using OTS2 for about a month now, and the ONLY problems I've seen are with poorly written themes.