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RustedGod

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Everything posted by RustedGod

  1. Oh, sorry for the confusing idioms, English seems to be full of them Anyway, thanks for both Vize and the new XPize alpha (must have just missed that post).
  2. Apologies for going slightly off topic here, but does this mean that the C# version of XPize will rear its head any time soon? Thanks for all the brilliant work on XPize by the way!
  3. If anyone is wondering how to make 32-bit BMPs (24-bit RGB + 8-bit alpha channel) in Photoshop, look no further: Photoshop: 32-bit BMPs Create your OEM logo with transparency as you normally would in Photoshop. Arrange all your layers so the image looks as you want it when finished. (It's not a bad idea to create a solid background of the same colour as the sysdm dialog box to get a good idea of this, or even just create it on top of a screenshot. Make sure you get rid of background before the next step, however.) Duplicate your image (Image -> Duplicate...) and check the box to duplicate merged images. (You could just merge all your layers, but if you want to change anything later it'll be easier this way.) If necessary, trim the image (Image -> Trim...) based on transparent pixels so it's as small as possible. Now hold Ctrl and click on the thumbnail of your image in the layer pallet, creating a selection based on its transparency. Head over to the channels pallet and create a new alpha channel. Ensuring you have white as the secondary colour (hit D to reset colours to white and black, then X to swap), clear the selection (Edit -> Clear or hit Delete). Hide the alpha channel, unhide the RGB channels and you're good to save. It goes without saying really, but make sure the alpha channel option is checked in the save dialog, and 32-bit is selected in the next dialog. That's it! You can now step back for a moment and take in the joy that is 8-bit transparency. Of course, you'll have to redo steps 3-10 in some form if you make any changes that affect the transparency, but you could always create a macro if you find yourself changing your mind a lot. The easiest way to get images with decent transparency already applied is to just search Google for PNGs. As for removing backgrounds in Photoshop, well.. there are plenty of tutorials for that elsewhere on the web. My own OEM logo:
  4. So has anyone figured this out? For my unattended CD (my first) I've given up trying to get the theme file to work properly and just removed system sounds with nLite. Not an entirely satisfactory solution but it does the job. Incidentally, the theme files seem to do the same with cursor schemes - if you have one set, then apply a theme, the scheme will be changed to a blank entry and any cursors undefined in your .theme are set to the Windows default (even if the default cursors aren't in the %systemroot%\cursors folder - I wonder where Windows keeps them). Anyway, if anyone knows how to get this working properly, what's the trick? Surely there are others who'd like some sounds, but not the godawful startup and shutdown ones.
  5. That won't necessarily help, unless you're running all standalone programs (I know Albator is trying to run everything standalone). Windows still needs the registry entries for all your programs, so there's not much point in keeping all the program directories on another partition. Not sure if it'd make any appreciable difference to FPS or load times, but if you play games at all, putting them in their own partition near the beginning of your PC's fastest drive may help. Perhaps after a partition for the swap file, or after a (hopefully small, if you're using nLite or reducing your installation some other way) Windows system partition. Has anyone experimented with this? I'm in the process of creating an unattended CD and reinstalling Windows, so I'd be interested to hear if anyone can say whether this is worth doing.
  6. As I've read elsewhere on the forums and from experience, Vopt does a really good job of compacting files to the beginning of a partition (there are three possible levels of packing to select from), making resizing the partition very fast - Partition Magic, for example, seems to rearrange files very inefficiently if there are any files towards the end of a partition, making resize operations take up to several hours, in the worst cases. While Diskeeper is pretty good, it tends not to rearrange large files very well, though its MFT resizing does come in handy.
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