Dave-H

I've been using that for several years now too, it works very well, and they say it will continue to receive pattern updates for the foreseeable future. It isn't free though. The free version of MB still works on XP too AFAIK, but has no real-time scanning.

I suppose at least some of the pinned threads, especially the locked ones, could be put into a "reference topics" subfolder? That would always be at the top of the board with the other two subfolders. Would that make them too much less obvious to people looking for help though?

Great job, thank you!

I do agree with you @ArcticFoxie to some extent, but I have always considered pinned threads, on any forum, to be reference material. They are there for forum users, especially new ones, to easily find information about commonly encountered problems. Of course what is an important problem, worthy of being given such permanent prominence, is very much a matter of opinion! I would like to hear the opinions of my fellow moderators on this. @dencorso@Tripredacus@Tommy

Funny you should do this now, as I've been thinking about consulting my fellow moderators about this very issue for a while now! There do seem to be rather a lot of pinned threads on some of the forums here, and it does need to be discussed as to whether they all still need to be pinned. Do bear in mind that they were all pinned originally for a good reason, at least in the opinion of a moderator, so they shouldn't be unpinned unless they really are now considered to be obsolete.

It sounds like it might be at least a starting point for @Tengereckito get the look he wants back then. Thinking about it more, I now remember that I did some of the customisation using Classic/Open Shell. My inactive windows' title bars are grey, not white, as in my screen grab. That might well have been a Open Shell thing, as was the colour of the taskbar. Active windows' title bars are blue.

Not someone else's theme, it was set up from scratch on a clean install of Windows 10. As I said, colored.msstyles is present in that folder so I would have thought it would work. What happens if you try it? This is what is should look like.

Thank you @UCyborg, I didn't know that, I had assumed, obviously wrongly, that any recent theme file would just work if it was loaded! The only *.msstyles files on my system seem to be default ones. aero.msstyles and aerolite.msstyles in C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\Aero and aerolite.msstyles and colored.msstyles in C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\Colored. They don't look like customised files, the dates are wrong on them. custom.msstyles doesn't seem to exist.

It's one I modified myself from the default, it's not one of the standard ones. I changed the taskbar to blue for instance, along with the highlights. Here it is if you'd like to try it! You can of course modify it to your own liking, but it might give you a starting point. Dave-H.theme

The background to my start menu tiles is blue like on your first image, but I do have a custom theme. Doing that may be the only way to get it the way you want it now I'm afraid. If you save the theme it should be easy to restore it if it gets changed in the future by an update, but that has never happened for me.

Did you have a custom theme before? It may have reverted to the default on an update.

I used to have an Asus netbook with very similar hardware. I went from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 8.1 on it too, and also upgraded the memory (to 4GB) and put an SSD in. It was still pretty slow, but usable. It wouldn't run Windows 10 at all as there was no compatible graphics driver, there are only Windows 7 drivers for that graphics chip. The Windows 7 driver I was using on Windows 8.1 just crashed all the time with Windows 10, and even with Windows 8.1 many Metro apps would crash so I couldn't use them. It was a 1024x600 screen too, but I used a registry hack to allow the graphics to switch to 1024x768 mode so the metro apps that didn't crash would at least start. The quality wasn't great though as it wasn't using the native resolution of the screen, and the image was distorted. Usable for things like e-mail, weather, and news though. So I agree, use Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell (now Open Shell) and that's the best you can do I think. The registry hack (Google for it) will enable you to use some, but not all, Metro apps.

Well I'm not sure what that actually is, but surely not being able to access the database doesn't mean that it doesn't exist any more?

I think it's extremely unlikely that the database was actually deleted. I'm not at all sure what the evidence for that was. They would certainly not have bothered to upload everything again if they had deleted it!

Thanks!

Good to hear! Could you add the information to this thread, outlining the procedure that you used? This will help others. Thanks, Dave.

Possibly, although I always imagined there would be a special mechanism for them, not using the public site.

I don't actually think it will ever work again, in fact I'm surprised it's still there, as I said earlier. The only thing it's any good for now is checking your update history.

Glad you sorted it!

Try selecting the "customizer" icon at the top and make sure that "Larger font-size for posts?" is switched on. It may have been on before but got switched off somehow. Also check the browser zoom level settings of course!

Are you using the latest version, v1.57? I had terrible problems with it, it seemed to be very unstable, freezing and crashing all the time. I ended up having to go back to v1.53, which still works fine.

Well I'm glad the replacement config.ini at least enabled it to try to connect without immediately failing! I can't connect to Microsoft Update either at the moment. Maybe a temporary problem, but who knows? I was actually surprised that they didn't take the update v6 web pages down anyway as soon as they changed the security protocol requirements, there are no supported operating systems or programs that still use that mechanism now anyway AFAIK!

That's very interesting, I wasn't aware of the "Lite" version of MediaInfo. I wonder if that will still work on XP with future versions of MediaInfo.dll? I suppose it depends on what's been done to make the full version incompatible with XP. If it's only GUI changes then the Lite version may still work.

Is that using my "config.ini" on ProxHTTPSProxy?

Maybe it won't work "out of the box". Try with my HTTPSProxy config.ini file in your installation, it has a lot added to it compared with the default version. Config.ini