ac4000

Join Date 02/2002

WB: opinions on "What Next"

I have been using WB 3.1A with Windows 2000 Pro for half a year now and am pretty pleased with it. There are about two or three dozen skins I DL'ed from WinCustomize, and I am very happy with some of them including Saphardana, Pabulum, Liquid2, Heavy Construction, OSXP and others.

In case anybody is wondering:
Duron 800
Asus A7A266
256 MB PC133 RAM
20 GB 6200 WD
Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP
etc.

I enjoy some of these skins so much that I would also like to consider buying the full $20 version of WindowBlinds in order to have the scrollbars affected as well, and various other features too.

The thing is, I have also noted an increased rate of inexplicable lockups, where previous to WB installation I saw very few. (I had been so thrilled at the superiority over Win98SE...) I wondered whether I was seeing the same sort of problems as the dissatisfied reviewers at CNet. I resolved to continue using WB during E-mail and browsing, but disable it during mission-critical stuff like CD burning, school assignments under deadline etc.

Interestingly, although WB does drag my school laptop (Celeron 500) noticeably, there have been no WB-related lockups on that machine.

So, if I am unimpressed with the stability of WB 3.1 (knowing that 3.3 has just been released), what do you think are my options? Is NextStart any better, or is it a different ball of wax altogether? (Does it disable itself after 30 days?)

Opinions appreciated!

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And where is this LiteStep that people keep referring to (and making skins for)? There is no real website at that URL; it's just a generic search-and-shop portal.

Was it perchance some beta connected with Stardock and for which official support was discontinued after WB launched?

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Oops. OK, a little searching goes a long way. I just didn't know that I would have to go through litestep.NET and then shellfront.org to find what I wanted.

Webmaster, any plans to adjust links?

Everybody else: opinions on relative stability etc.?

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Koasati

Join Date 07/2001

+21

NextSTART is a start menu replacement.
LiteSTEP is a shell replacement.
Neither is a window skinner.
Both are excellant, but will not replace WindowBlinds.
You are comparing oranges to bananas.

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I'm running WindowBlinds AND WinStep on a Win2000 dekstop (GForce) and I've never had it lock up like you describe.

The only problem I've had is with a particular app (NetCaptor) that does not respond properly to repaint commands when I switch skins. NetCaptor will often peg the CPU. It slows the whole computer to a crawl until it finishes repainting. But again, this is not WindowBlinds' problem.

As for WinStep, I've not had any problems with that either.

I do have problems with both on my win2k laptop but that's because it has buggy ATI video drivers (which unfortunately have not been updated in a long time) that screw up all graphic intensive applications. Are there any newer video drivers you could try?

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GreenReaper

Join Date 05/2001

+32

98, even SE, is screwed up enough that even with the most stable drivers in the world things are going to crash.

Litestep is totally different and does different things. I can't really comment on it's stability as I haven't significantly used it.

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I had excellent stability on my Win 98 box until about version 3.10 of Windowblinds. Now it crashes continually. Returning to the desktop from a full screen DOS program locks up the computer totally if Windowblinds is loaded. Object bar is just about unusable. It crashes while I'm typing in notepad or if I just mouseover on the start menu. If I disable Windowblinds and ObjectBar, I have no crashes at all.

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GreenReaper

Join Date 05/2001

+32

Hmm. Well, that shouldn't be happening. All I can suggest is try 3.3, and if that doesn't help, make a bug report on the newsgroups or to support@stardock.com. Similarly for ObjectBar (might want to wait a week or so until a new shareware version comes out).

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GreenReaper-Thank you for your reply. I have been a OD subscriber for 2 years, and have the latest programs. I have posted several times in the newsgroups, but had no resolution. WinStyles won't run at all (can't load skin.dll), and Windowblinds won't apply the Icon Package anymore. The Iconpackager issue is not just Win 98, as it doesn't work on Win 2000 either.

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I would like to see WindowBlinds skin the spinner controls. That really sticks out on my machine. I think too much attention is spent on Windows XP. How many software-buying people have Windows XP right now versus the warez people? It appears from my vantage point that Stardock gets too worried about satisfying the hacker crowd and not enough on the jane and joe user crowd.

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Avid Litestep user here. Did wonders for stability in Win98SE when properly tweaked. Works well with WB. I usually do a WB skin for my Litestep themes to give my desktop a unified look. Its not plug and play like NextStart, you have to enjoy customizing, but it has a lot less overhead.

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