Zoinkity

http://tihiy.ahanix.org/uberskin.exe -or you can go to the thread just a couple thingies below this one ;*) I know the icons in the shell can be swapped through simple registry entries, but how many others can be altered using the same trick?

It's going to go unreleased, since I can't get permission to distribute. For the record, it's a port of simpleXP. Shame too, since it didn't come out half bad.

Oh no, sorry! That's not what I meant! I meant the crystal themes aren't particular favorites of mine. I only really did them since there have been a few requests, plus there were some tricky bits that seemed fun to try to port. If you compare this to the image source, you'll notice more than a few changes were made to port it. You can say pretty much anything you like about them really. I just hope they're (fairly) true to the originals. I know what you mean though about every theme being blue and black. There's a green one that's a personal favorite, and swap it out with a purple one to add a little variety.

You know, the absolute best part of porting a skin is that you can redirect most of the critiscism to somebody else Tell you the truth, I can't stand them at all. I don't care for the round buttons and the taskbar (aegh...) The little tux though is just adorable ;*)

That's pretty much what I thought. Even back then HP abandoned it, figuring nobody would ever want a HDD over 8GB Looks like a PCI controller is the best bet. Lament...

I have an old Vectra VA, and unfortunately the BIOS are old enough that it doesn't accept HDD over 8GB. It has PhoenixBIOS 4.05.N (GZ.07.05), and obviously nobody supports this old hardware anymore. If magically it is possible to replace the bios with a newer 4.06 version, larger disks would be supported. However, arbitrarily swapping BIOS doesn't seem like the smartest idea ;*) so I'd like to know just how generic these are and if it has any chance of working.

Oy... Look, I'm just doing the skin itself. Icons are easy enough to get, and besides, UBERskin doesn't apply them on its own. Heck, I couldn't really apply them if I wanted too. This 2GB disk is down to 100MB of space. Probably time to remove some stuff ;*)

A few people have made noise about wanting these, and it was not an easy one to port by any means. Here's Crystal dlb 2 and Crystal dlb BE, both ported and ready for use with UBERskin. They aren't without their faults, and a few things had to be done differently to work under a different skinning engine. Sorry ahead of time. It has a really cute little penguin for a start button, which probably explains the appeal ;*) Original credit goes to dlb of CrystalXP.net Below is a screenshot of black edition; the floppy must have a corrupted sector since the blue theme image is fried. Well, they're practically the same anyway. http://www.geocities.com/nefariousdogooder.../Crystaldlb.zip Crystaldlb.rar

That's peculiar... I've never seen that error before. Forgot that these forums allow direct attachments. If the above links continue to be stupid, try getting these attachments instead. (note: attached blackmesa to previous post. stupid 200k limit...) [Edit] Revised all three files now with trackbars ;*) Luna.rar WatercolorLAME.rar

Here you go. This zip contains both the olive theme (homestead), and the metallic one. It uses some of the files from 'Windows XP' which was found in UBERskin, just a warning. Also contains some flag-only startbuttons if you feel like switching them around. http://www.geocities.com/nefariousdogooder/Win/Luna.zip Ported that bugger too. You can find it here: http://www.geocities.com/nefariousdogooder/Win/BlackMesa.zip -Oh, and for fun, ported Watercolor Lite, which is based on the old Whistler builds. It has a very classic look, and this set has six or seven color variants. Something like that... Purple, red, two blues, green, yellow, and grey. http://www.geocities.com/nefariousdogooder...ercolorLame.zip [Edit] Added BlackMesa as an attachment. Due to size, WatercolorLAME and Luna are two posts down. Now (should) have trackbar slider control thingies! BlackMesa.rar

On vista clicking the icon has no effect. On XP, clicking it results in it working for a while, then telling you it can't find it. I have tried using cables with both, but again no change. I've also tried setting the network up again from scratch. Oddly, this just keeps happening. At the least I should be able to access the PC's directly by dialing their IP, right?

Already tried disabling both firewalls and both computers have been using network discovery. They'll appear in the workgroup and on the network map, but neither appears in the network folder and you can't connect from either the wokgroup or network map windows.

The XP is trying to share the printer. I don't have another PC available.

Can't quite figure this one out... I'm trying to get file and printer sharing between a Vista computer and XP that happen to use the same router. The XP is connected via cable, the Vista is wireless. I've already gotten the TTLD patch for the XP computer, and oddly enough both can 'see' each other when you make a network map or check the workgroup. However, neither shows up in network places on the opposing computer. Both computers are allowing file and printer sharing, so that shouldn't be the issue. How the heck would you go about setting this up?

Thanks! I didn't know how you could move the swap file, which in general has been a great help since the secondary drive is newer, larger, and just a better place to stuff it. The defrag and scandisk took less than an hour, which is a heck of an improvement from the day-long ordeal it was before. Splendid!

Usually I just run the disk defragmenter from the start menu, but it will take forever. Windows is constantly writting to the disk so the defragmenter will need to restart over and over again. It can take most of a day to do the primary drive, then maybe an hour tops to do anything else plugged inot it. Is there a way to schedule defragmentation before the OS starts or in some way that it won't constantly need to restart?

Class 5 Mechwarriors 2: Mercenaries (requires patch 1.05p or above when used with kernelEX) Specificly, there's a CD read error when going into a stage on all v1.0 games. It's present in XP and oddly enough becomes present in OS's with the kernelEx patch applied. Patching the game with the official 1.05p, 1.06, or 1.1 patches should remedy this. Worth noting at least.

The two biggest reasons I have win 98 and win 3.1 computers lying around has to do with old hardware and port access. Usually I only upgrade hardware or get a new computer when there's one out on the corner for the trash ;*) The big issue is port access. If you've ever tried to program anything that uses an LPT port in recent years you'd know that all these newer systems force you to go through a driver. This, in itself, isn't that big an issue, but port access is still limitted even then. If you intend to send, say, a couple MB of data through an LPT port you can expect it to randomly fail periodicly on XP/2000 unless you use a driver and don't build a GUI application. Why it is more stable from the command line is anyone's guess... Personally I don't have any real issue with XP, but for many purposes you almost require an earlier OS.

Ah hah! It can be done! REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ExtShellViews\{BE098140-A513-11D0-A3A4-00C04FD706EC}] "Attributes"="1" "IconArea_Image"="C:\\imagepath.ext" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ExtShellFolderViews\{BE098140-A513-11D0-A3A4-00C04FD706EC}] The HKLM line sets the default attributes for this namespace. The font color commands are overridden by Windows itself, but you can set the default icon area image no problem. Any settings in the folder's own desktop.ini will override this. To utilize the feature you just add the namespace to the ExtShellFolderViews for whatever directory you want to affect. The HKCR above affects all directories, but you could selectively change only certain system folder backgrounds by adding the namespace to their respective CLSID.

How would you set a sort of default folder background for all folders? Is this something that's possible through the registry, or can it be embedded in the htt used for the sidebars? On a completely unrelated note, there isn't a way to set up a seperate image in an htt file for a different drive? Something like %drive%/image.ext

Hmm... Most animations are actually AVIs embedded in the various programs (usually dlls) that are used for the function. That applies at least to copy, move, anything having to do with zip files, etc. If you install the newest IE, it messes with a few of them. Changing all the animations would be time consuming, but it's easy enough to do with a resource editor.

The structure of cabinet files is a little different from most other archive types, and I have yet to see a single program that appends to them in a sensible fashion. Cabinets are divided into 'folders', which is to say that groups of files are compressed together, and that these groups are all archived into a single cab file. Folders aren;t like those on your filesystem; these are arbitrary groups you compress together because they have similar characteristics. Compression rate and decompression/seek speed is dependant on: 1) how large each folder is (in size and quantity) 2) how how well those files happen to compress together 3) type of compression used. So, if you were, say, to just append the cabinet itself with an additonal file, that file probably wouldn't compress well, but the cabinet's seek/decompression rate would be about the same. However, if (like most utilities) it just tore the whole thing apart, stuffed everything into a single folder, and all that mess was compressed in one huge block of doom it would take for freaking ever to retrieve a single file from the end of your LZ compressed data. So, I know that wasn't really helpful, but hopefully it was informative. Cabs are rather neat ;*)

Microsoft released a small component, similar to the zipfldr and cabview libraries, that allows you to open, view, and extract files from lzh and lha compressed folders. The only trouble is, they only released it in Japan! This is a simple translation of the lzhfldr.dll. The zip contains the installer, and yes the irony is certainly not lost. Incidentally, they built the bugger on the back of the zipfldr. It can't create new archives (the original couldn't either) but if you're just looking to view and extract them, then this is right up your alley. http://www.geocities.com/nefariousdogooder...drinstaller.zip