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It took a little work to find everything but to most people if they look at my laptop they would think I was running Vista. I have an Aeroglass style theme that is used by any application that is XP Theme Aware. Dropdowns used in windows and applications are semi-transparent. There are window animations that look just like Vista for copying, deleting, moving, etc. I am using an Icon set that is similar to the ones used in Vista. Even the taskbar at the bottom of the screen looks like Vista.
All of these changes added maybe an extra 2 meg of overhead and with no perceptible hit in speed or processor usage. If a person wants to make their XP computer look as pretty as Vista they can and without any of the performance hits.
Last edited by AKA Panama Jack on Sun Aug 05, 2007 10:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I've looked into this myself, and
~AKA Panama Jack: don't you need windowblinds for the transparency? XP themes alone have either all-or-none transparency.
~Everyone else:
You can get very close to this by looking around on websites like customise.org if you don't want to pay for windowblinds.
Personally, I suggest studiotwentyeight.com. You can find very nice themes there.
The one catch is that you have to download a 'fixed' dll and replace the one automatically installed by windows.
back to ~AKA Panama Jack:
If you want to even closer, getting windows desktop search or even approcket will give the feel of the real vista
Yeah, I am using Windowblinds 5.5 with the VistaXP Glass theme.
And with the current versions of Windowblinds you don't have the performance hit so going to a pure Windows Classic theme isn't going to be more responsive. Well... maybe it would be if you were running on a 500mhz PIII.
Windowblinds 6 which is in beta will give you access to many other controls for adjusting things like transparency on different things. Plus it adds the blurring effect for transparency which can be turned on or off.
I just find it funny that you can make XP look and act like Vista and be a lot faster than Vista. Just goes to show you that there is a ton of useless overhead from crappy, bloated programming in Vista.
I don't mind eyecandy. In fact I like eyecandy. But it had better not impact on performance.
In other words if I have eyecandy like this it has better not slow down programs at all unless the eyecandy is executing. Like the AeroGlass effect. That is mainly controlled inside your graphics card and is only activated when you are opening, closing or moving windows. If you aren't doing any of those things then there should be absolutely no difference from running an eyecandy free environment.
Older versions of Windowblinds did have a bad habit of stealing a lot of processor cycles when you were doing nothing but it looks like the recent versions no longer do that bad thing. So I am willing to go for all the eyecandy.
But once it starts impacting on things like my games then away it goes. But so far no drop in performance with it installed.