LiteStep.net Forums

Forgive me if this question has been answered, I search google and it did not present a result.

I am building a PC for output only. I would like a shell to take little RAM for games and audio engineering.

Is anyone here aware of a side by side benchmark comparison between explorer and litestep? Also, on that note is anyone here aware of a litestep theme that takes little memeory.

I ran a benchmark just for you.
Litestep uses about half the CPU and About 31% less memmory
and It didn't matter which for HDD read and write. But all in all it is a better choice for system performance. My current configuration is
Athlon XP 2200
384mb's of DDR ram
Win 2kpro

of course, these results depend *entirely* on the theme used... there are many themes out there that would most definitely run slower than explorer, while there are many that would run much faster.

Awesome, Thank you my friends for your help. May I ask yet one more thing of you?

Which theme would you recommend for optimizing performance for Direct3d games? Here are my system specs, I am trying to squeeze every FPS possible:

Athlon Barton 2500+
1 gig of Corsair DDR Dual Channel 466mhz
120 Serial ATA HD
Radeon 9600XT

when I ran the benchmark I used Visual-17, and I just did another with Hacker OS and Hacked02. They all ran better numbers than explorer. You could always try a minimal theme, less moduales less memmory needed. Now you have me wondering is your system homegrown or custom order. And just in case your wondering mine is homegrown for only $475 and turns better numbers than any Dell or Gateway with any Pentium I have seen. A friend and I spent long hours running tests to get those results but all those systems were stock and mine is far from it. My poor machine is just about tweaked out, so I think, but hey there is always room for improvement don't you think/

Homegrown all the way. I would never buy from a company, with the rare exception of Alienware. I am just trying to pull everything I can out of it. Looks like minimal is where I am going to have to go.

Ummm... With a PC like that I don't believe you are going to see any significant difference between using Explorer and LS regardless of the theme.

But if you want to make sure your shell doesn't consume even the smallest amount of resources whilst gaming then I would simply quit LS before starting the game.

If that's a little too far then the next best thing would be to create your own theme. Include a desktop module and a popup module and you have yourself a working minimal theme. You don't even need to provide any configuration since the modules have default settings.

To save you the trouble, here's a fully functional, minimal theme.

1. Create a folder in your themes directory called "MiniMe"
2. In the "MiniMe" directory create a file called theme.rc
3. Paste the below code into it.

;-----------------------------------------
; LiteStep environment config
;-----------------------------------------

OTSMajorVersion 2
OTSMinorVersion 0

ThemeName "MiniMe"
ThemeAuthor "Charles Worm"

;-----------------------------------------
; loadmodule config
;-----------------------------------------

*NetLoadModule jdesk-0.711
*NetLoadModule popup2-2.1.1

Whullah! Now just recycle and select "MiniMe" from you list of themes.

*netloadmodule jdesk-0.73
*netloadmodule popup2-2.1.6

would be better(:

Thank you, I will check the resources consumed by each. at boot right now, my machine (with IE open) is consuming: 72 megs of ram. I think that's way high for an OS that simply launches applications. I have sliced down on the services, etc and the only thing that's in my startup menu is my sound icon. I just like to pull everything that I can out of my machines. Anyone know any secrets that I may not know about to do this under Win2k? :)

Why do you need a desktop and a popup? Just use hotkeys for everything.

Or for that matter, set cmd.exe as your shell (I wonder if you can get it to start fullscreen... ;), or even notepad.exe and run things from the file open dialog.

I like to use Task Manager :)

"at boot right now, my machine (with IE open) is consuming: 72 megs of ram. I think that's way high for an OS that simply launches applications"

What are you worried about? You have 1GB of RAM. 72MB won't make a pinch of difference to your benchmark scores. Even still, you should be looking at the Mem Usage for your Processes if you want to know that that 72MB is being used by.

"What are you worried about? You have 1GB of RAM. 72MB won't make a pinch of difference to your benchmark scores. Even still, you should be looking at the Mem Usage for your Processes if you want to know that that 72MB is being used by."

You may have a point. Strangely enough, the total amount of ram my processes are currently taking is only 32 megs. But Windows reports 81 megs taken up.

How do you know they are only taking 32MB?

Because there is a "Memory usage" number to the right of them and I added it all up.

Those numbers are not necessarily reliable though.

I see, how can I accurately caluclate the numbers then?