I used to benchmark my system almost daily but haven't been that bored for years... Whatever happened to the Landmark Speed Test? I'd love to test it if someone knows a good benchmarking utility (that doesn't take hours to run). It would be interesting to see how fast different skins are too.

ve have vays.......

thanks!

Pat,

I have never understood this continuing drama over WB being so slow. My home computer is nothing to write home about, especially when compared to the new offerings out now. I have been using WB for a year and a half now and have never noticed a significant performance hit. I boot minimal, with nothing to speak of running, often to do disk clean up etc. and I can not tell the difference.

So in the benchmarking of viual perception I can say WB is a transparent task!

OK Froggy - I must be an idiot. Your chart is a bit obscure. Is the bottom value expressed in milliseconds? If so, then doesn't this contradict your statement that WB is faster?

Am I misreading this data?

I too, must agree. While wb is quicker in a few areas, the majority of tasks are quicker with msstyles.

Sorry, I spoke without being educated, I just naturally thought faster meant a shorter bar, that's what I was basing my last post on.

alright, i bit....

firstly, let's go ahead and get the link here, so y'all can see the results...may as well open it in a new window so you can look at it and read this at the same time.

[url=http://137.54.229.3:8044/book1.htm]meph's skinbench results adventure ride of fun[/url]

now, up top you'll see the source data, and below that the graphs. i chose to do individual graphs per test since, well, they're individual tests so they should be shown seperately, as well as seeing what the breakdown's are like.

now, to the right is the color key, and i tried to get the color behind the individual datas in teh table to match those of the graphs, just for consistency (i'll come back to that word later)

Now, with each skin name, you'll also see a parenthetical letter/number...M stands for an msstyle skin, 2 for a UIS2 skin and 1 for a UIS1+ skin.

interestingly enough, notice Luna (which is installed by default by windowblinds) has a 1. keep that in mind after i go over a few of the tests.

alright, on to the data!

the data goes from bottom to top, so, we'll start at the bottom.

i'm just gonna point out a few things that y'all can see but that it's good to have said aloud regardless.

now, where windowblinds shines, and this data shows it, is moving windows about, partly because they are hardware accelerated. msstyles get some acceleration, but it's not in moving windows about and it's also nothing to write home about either...now notice, moving and resizing windows, windowblinds trounces msstyles by all of 150 skinmarks for moving and 230 for resizing. now then, this is only for the uis1 skin. for the 2 uis2 skins, they are slightly better to below their corresponding msstyles variants.

from there msstyles are ahead for editbox resizes, button moves, checkbox moves, radiobutton moves, up until activating a window. here's the odd thing. msstyles is just as fast as uis1 luna, and faster than the uis2 versions...by a large amount.

then again we have moving and resizing which, of course, windowblinds takes hands down. but, interestingly enough, windowblinds chokes on resizing the editbox behind windows...sure, it doesn't happen in real use much, but still, it's interesting nonetheless.

then vertical and horizontal resizing, which windowblinds takes again, due in part to the hardware acceleration i'm betting. from there it's pretty much even for the next three, msstyles takes the tab control cycles (which cycles between selected/unselected repeatedly)...

...then we come to the oddball. that being the progress controls, and this being where windowblinds makes up it's difference. if i were doing this for a lab, i'd have to throw out the progress controls as being an out-lier(sp?) because there's no way it's statistically near any of the other tests. something's going on there, but i have no clue what it could be, especially when you've got windowblinds up 10 times what msstyles has, and such great variation within it's own data (between windowblinds skins)...

moving on you've got a listview header control cycle, which is about 'even' aside from the luna 2485 skin which is actually not skinning the headers so it can be thrown out.

then the totals. windowblinds wins in most cases, xp ocean (another default install skin) loses to both luna and preluna (it's msstyles counterpart). now, interesting turn of events, take out the progress controls score, and i'm betting windowblinds wouldn't win the total score, which is what most people would care about. i'd do it myself, but i don't know the math as to how the scores are figured up cause it's based on cycles per a given amount of time with some proportionality factor as compared to classic thrown in to get a relative score.

now, conclusions:

this is very interesting data i believe. just so y'all can see, i'll now post the contents of my wb.ini file to show that no favortism was given:

NoShowWarning=0 noProgress=0 noTabs=0 noScroll=0 nosound=0 SizeLimit=0 WindowLock=0 UseHWAcc=0 WARNINGMESS=6 Hyperpaint=1 ForceDDB=1 HyperPaintMode=4 HideMinMax=1 Gamma=660 wbd=0 Path=C:\Program Files\Object Desktop\WindowBlinds ResizeOpt=1 ;skindisplay=1

note also that this is wb 3.3g, newest build off of odnt that i could find.

now, what does all this really say? it says that windowblinds being TWICE as fast as msstyles isn't quite right. more like TWICE as fast...in some situations, and about as fast in others.

now, onto that word consistency that i said i'd come back to...

first of all, skinbench is good in theory...no offense to greenreaper, but it's not fleshed out well enough to really mean all that much. the newest version i could find was from october 19, and it had just added in menu and header tests (i think). now, in the 6 months since then, there's been no new modules added in, yet there've been new controls skinned and able to be tested. now, if i knew how to code for new modules, i'd try my hand at getting something put in there, but, i don't, so i won't. i'd probably add in the start panel being opened and closed, submenus on it being opened and closed, taskbar animations, and system tray open/close. but that's just a feature request i think.

the second is overall consistency in general. i was disappointed to not be able to find a true luna skin to be able to test with, since the included luna isn't quite the same as the msstyles luna (colors different, menus aren't skinned, fonts are way off, some images (scrollbars, toolbar backgrounds) are outdated, etc.)...

...and that's the thing. yes windowblinds is still evolving, but, consistency (and i've harped on this before, i know) is still lacking. you never know what you're going to get when you install a new skin, much less open up a new app or even new dialog box....

...it's like you go out and you buy this game that you've heard rave reviews about and you're playing and it's great, it's just what you expected. but then, you're going, and something's just not right. like, some texture doesn't line up right or there's a spot where you shouldn't be able to jump up to but you do make it up there and it causes you to get past the bad guys without firing a shot...something that just makes you think for a split second that you're not suspending belief and that you are in fact playing a game. that's how windowblinds is. benchmarks can only show so much, actual use shows so much more.

windowblinds is great, no question. but, it's not living up to some of the hype. there's just enough small things to pull you out and say 'hey, i can see what windows is really like, and it frightens me' or 'hey, isn't windowblinds supposed to take care of that? what's going on?'

it's like quake 2 multiplayer was to the old quakeworld...quake2 was a far superior game, no question about it (sonic mayhem's soundtrack couldn't hold a candle to NIN's quake1 work though) but still, quake 2's multiplayer felt so lagged compared to quakeworld...and patch after patch after patch didn't help. carmack eventually just said 'look, quake2 IS the faster networking subsystem' and had to 'break' quake 2's multiplayer so it felt as fast (and not as lagged) as quakeworld...

the moral? it's not so much raw speed as it is the illusion of speed...

hope this helps whoever needs it...oh, system specs in case it's necessary:

64mb geforce 2
winxp
512 mb ram
p3 550
detonators, version 28.32

Mephisto,

We both know each other's arguments so I'll boil it down to the basics:

There are a handful of GUI elements that WindowBlinds doesn't currently skin such as the task pane in Explorer and the spinner controls and the scrollbars in drop down combos.

On the other hand:
Windows XP by default doesn't skin 99% of existing applications. It only fully skins "theme aware" apps which you can count the # of those on two hands and only in their latest/greatest version.

For me, XP without WindowBlinds looks very incosistent. It is weird loading up Word XP and having the scrollbars be the Windows 95 style. It is odd loading up Corel Draw and having it look mostly like a Windows 95 app. But when I run WindowBlinds, it skins all that.

So the question is which inconsistency is worse. For me, XP not skinning existing apps is worse. Clearly you feel differently.

I think it's really a race - will WindowBlinds skin those remaining GUI elements BEFORE a significant number of apps become theme aware. If we're having this conversation a year from now, then WB has lost that argument.

hehe, David, "...some day realize the difference", I must say that your last thread is a very good answer!

Frogboy, the 99% of the people don't care at all, about the WindowBlinds speed, they don't even think about it, they just like WB Skins and they use them. Any way, it is good for us to know that WB are very fast too!

mephisto, in your wb.ini you have
UseHWAcc=0
Does this mean you are not using hardware acceleration? How does changing this value to 1 affect the benchmark?

I have tried both Mmstyles and Windowblinds and I prefer WB - adni18 is right, speed is not important (just as long as it is not slow...umm is that a contradiction??) the extra features in WB such as smart buttons, roll ups and custom colours all make me want to stay with WB.

Which is faster? Astin Martin Vanquish V12 or Ferrari 550 Maranello? Who cares I'll take either home

(Actually, I would always go for the Aston Martin)

Hum... I don't know about benchmarks and all, but I am have been working without Windowblinds at home for a week or two now, and I can feel the difference. Things seems smoother for some reason.
But this is my home PC mind you, it's old and crappy, so maybe WB is faster but on faster machines? My home PC is a 333 Celeron with 256 Megs of RAM, and an 8 Megs 3DFX Voodoo3.

I love Windowblinds, but for the moment I actually like the plain look of Windows XP without fancy running. Don't worry, I'll grow out of that phase too.

Maybe you should just go with saying "faster" rather than "twice as fast", then. More reliably true.