DKRendeR

How is this done? I've looked through the Advanced portion of the Appearance tab and found no option to change the "shading" and "highlighting" of the 3D windows. I still don't know how he removed the bevel on indented portions of the theme (ie: the notification area)

Yeah, it definitely looks like HmmXP but he doesn't use Visual Styles, I know that for a fact. He told me he had changed the start menu button, maybe he did do it with Tclock2 or Lclock. Isn't it possible to hack that in Explorer.exe? I still don't know how he changed the bevel on the bars and button, though. :/

A buddy on another forum posted some of pics of his desktop, and I think they are nothing short of amazing! He said he's running XP with the classic theme yet he's managed to totally give it a smooth and sophisticated look. He also isn't using a Visual Style or any 3rd party apps to acheive this. I know how he hacked explorer.exe to delete some of the entries from his Start menu, but that's about it. Some of the neato highlights of his hack-job are the color changes to the interface (that light gray-blue), the lack of borders around the Start menu and Notification area, and the font change (font is called Calibri, btw). Does anyone know how he did all this? He won't tell anyone, but I like the change so much. Minimalism FTW!

My memory isn't overclocked/volted in the slightest. I AM overclocking my Athlon XP Mobile from 1.8ghz, 1.45vcore 133fsb --> 2.0ghz 1.45vcore 200fsb. I don't know if that's making a difference or not. But my RAM is hot. I read that if you can't keep your fingers on the RAM itself for more than 1 or 2 seconds that the temperature is somewhere around 60-70 degrees celsius. It feels like 60. Should I take the ramsinks off?

I have a case with pretty limited airflow (Shuttle) and I noticed my RAM was pretty **** hot. I have OCZ Performance PC3200 running at the full 400MHz. Are the heatsinks even helping or are they making things worse?

I've got most of my WinXP OS tweaked just the way I want now, however that darn animated flag in (Windows) Explorer just looks plain ugly with my theme. Is there any to remove it permanently?

I've got a Viewsonic monitor that's capable of doing 1152x864 @ 85hz natively. I've set the res and refresh in winnt.sif and when XP is finished installing, I enter Windows with 75hz. The resolution is correct, however. Under the display properties, 85hz is listed as "not a compatible rate for my monitor" What I'm trying to avoid is installing my monitor drivers via RunOnceEx. It seems kinda dumb installing drivers just so I can push that extra 10hz. Any ideas on how to get XP to install with the proper refresh rate?

I used the preNRM driver only. As I said before... someone had said that drivers in preNRM were only for nForce 3 and up. I've got an nForce 2 Ultra chipset and those drivers worked properly.

Well, I was right. I used the drivers that were in the preNRM folder, and they worked like a charm.

I used nLite to add my chipset drivers to my unattended XP SP2 disc. Just in case you didn't know, nLite bundles up all the drivers in one folder when it puts them on the disc. Everything is fine and dandy when I install XP. And when the installation is done, everything is normal EXCEPT for the fact that my Ethernet Card drivers don't get installed. The first time this happened, I just clicked on "Update Driver" and let it automatically find the driver. It found it and installed it quickly and easily. Well why didn't it just install the driver in the first place if it didn't pop and errors up. Well, now this time I thought it was the "preNRM" folder that came with the drivers. I left it out the first time, and added the second time. Now the problem has gotten much worse. The Ethernet drivers just don't install AT ALL! I let Windows try and search for them, but it says it can't find them. I'm using the the newest nForce Chipset 5.10. The drivers are WHQL. Anyone have any ideas? EDIT: I think I found the problem... I still have to test it, though. I read on the forums here, that the two folders that come with the nForce drivers (preNRM and NAM) were only for nForce 3 and above chipsets. Well, the drivers work wonders when I installed them. So I'm gonna pu them on my CD and try again.

Awesome! Thanks for the info

Are the nForce IDE drivers made to replace the ones that come with XP? Say... if I removed the IDE drivers from my XP disc using nLite, would all my drives (CD, HDD) still work OK? [slightly off-topic] XP doesn't recognize the capture features of my GeForce 5900XT automatically. If I put the drivers on the disc and specify the folder in OEMPnPDriversPath, will they get installed automatically? [/slightly off-topic] EDIT: Oh, and is it safe to delete all the files in the root directory of the nForce Driver folder: data1.cab data1.hdr data2.cab engine32.cab etc... ?? I'm gonna install the drivers using OEMPnPDriversPath

The ISO is most likely for burning to DVD. You won't be able to burn it onto regular CDs.

I'm using ResEdit to hack winntbbu.dll. So, If I wanted to remove all of the Windows Xp logos, I could do so safely and Windows Setup won't quack at me?

Does it HAVE TO be a 256 BMP? Or can I save it as a 24-bit?

I'm not sure if this helps or not... but on the page describing silent installs on the sun java page (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/deployment/deployment-guide/silent.html) it says, and I quote: So, I'm thinking that even though we think we're telling it not to reboot, it WILL reboot because setup doesn't encounter any "locked files"... and thus the computer reboots. It might also explain why some people's computers are rebooting, and some other's are not. Different files are being used on each person's computer. EDIT: I POSSIBLY may have got this to install properly without reboot. I'm just executing this from Start -> Run.... I'm using the installer from java.sun.com version 1.5.0 Update 1 with the switches: jre5.exe /s /v"/qn ADDLOCAL=jrecore IEXPLORER=1 REBOOT=Suppress JAVAUPDATE=0"

OK, I think I got it. I got a line in my RunOnceEx that runs mplayerc.exe /regvid (all I want MPC to play are my video files). This just registers the file types, and does not run the program at all.

I've put MPC on my unattended XP CD, and I've totally wiped out whatever version comes with the XP CD. What I'm asking is, what will happen to the file associations? Will all my movie and music files play with MPC by default now? Or will I manually have to set the associations myself? (maybe .reg files??)

Does anyone have a link to the latest version of RyanVM's SP2 update pack? His site has been down for a long time :\

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=297 This has a good working boot image. I use it myself. It also shows all the settings to make it work. However, since you want your DVD to boot instead of the shown CD Method, just use DVD (Boot) with all the same settings.