[FreeTerran]

We can i change the skin when i change it then are only a new background and the taskbar is the old.

Can anyone help me ?

[Solatar]

Sorry...can you rephrase that? I'm not sure I understand your problem.

[Tiara]

He wants to know if there is a skin for XP to change the taskbar.

[FreeTerran]

Nope,
I install a skin but the teskbar is after the installation the old windows standard taskbar.

[Nico]

in the display properties you can change your windows appearence, it's a roll menu called skin. there's choices only between the old and XP versions of windows. freeterran wants to know if there's other skins available.

[FreeTerran]

OK i have find the bug and thx for helping.

[Fineus]

On that note, does anyone know some decent skinning programs to allow for different GUIs? I'm just getting used to it but I find the blue/green a little to "in your face", the silver and olive suck and I'd rather not have the same old Windows 98 look if i can help it. Any thoughts?

[Kamikaze]

do you want totally new looks (i.e. litewave, blackbox, aston desktop, desktop x) or just a few parts being different? (for the latter try windowblinds and maybe some other object desktop componenets)

Whatever the case, these take up more memory and processor power than explorer (at least with win98/2k, don't know about xp's chunky GUI) or in the case of windowblinds just adds more strain to explorer's already extreme memory/proc costs. (except Blackbox, as that's a light-weight linux window manager ported to windows)

[Fineus]

I'd go with a completely new look - it's not that I hate Windows look and yeah, I guess I'm used to it. But XX is old and XP is chunky and a little on the childish side. I'd rather have a clean and well cut GUI where everything is clearly labelled but unintrusive. Possible?

[Stryke 9]

Err... are you sure? They're all memory hogs, and they generally are pretty badly done to boot- screw up your computer like nothin', and it's good luck only if you get 'em to work in the first place.

[Solatar]

Originally posted by Stryke 9
Err... are you sure? They're all memory hogs, and they generally are pretty badly done to boot- screw up your computer like nothin', and it's good luck only if you get 'em to work in the first place.

Hm...I must have excellent luck...desktop X hasn't caused a single problem for me...

[Stryke 9]

Very much so. I do believe that's the one that sucked out all my memory as soon as I booted it up, then put the computer into a series of crashes so that I had to reboot the computer only about a dozen times to get to the program and delete it.

[Kamikaze]

http://www.bb4win.org/news.php <-- clean, fast, light window manager ported from linux

http://litestep.info/ <-- litestep, built based on the NeXtStep interface (NeXtStep was a unix-based os iirc, now the license went to Mac and they made Darwin from it) and is probably the most popular and is pretty nice looking (edit: argh...sounds confusing, it's not necessarily the most nice looking ). Highly customizable.

http://www.stardock.com/products/desktopx/ <-- desktop x, somewhat popular shell replacement. Packaged with the "object desktop" package. Memory hog when I used it (many months ago).

http://www.windowblinds.net/ <-- part of object desktop, changes window frame stuff.

http://www.astonshell.com/aston/index.html  <-- aston shell, haven't used it. no comment.

http://www.lighttek.com/talisman.htm <-- talisman, don't know how it handles.

http://www.hellbent.com/digitaloxide/litespawn/ <-- I suggest you use this if you're going to use any shell replacement. It runs "under" everything and prompts you what shell to load (litestep, explorer and so on) after login. Also, if you're shell crashes it can restart the shell (or a different shell), reboot or shutdown. Useful if you aren't commited to quiting the explorer thing.


Note: most of these don't have file managers so you'll still be using the explorer file manager, though it may look different.

[Fineus]

Thanks for the links/advice - though I'm a little dubious since I really know nothing at all about these things at the moment and don't want to bugger things up one day after install...

[Solatar]

Originally posted by Stryke 9
Very much so. I do believe that's the one that sucked out all my memory as soon as I booted it up, then put the computer into a series of crashes so that I had to reboot the computer only about a dozen times to get to the program and delete it.

How much memory do you have?

[Zeronet]

i once had a matrix skin.

[FreeTerran]

Cool
Can i see a screenshot ?

[Tiara]

[Solatar]

Originally posted by Zeronet
i once had a matrix skin.

sweet.

I had a nemesis one, but the windows were animated and that started eating up my memory.

[Tiara]

WindowBlinds is good though. I use it: