iCEhOT

LOL, 50 megs?? Who cares buy some more memory if it bothers you that much, memory is so cheap these days i cant believe anyone actually cares how much memory anything uses anymore. Fair enough 50 megs maybe a lot for a mere driver, and maybe explained by it sharing system memory, however, 50 megs out of 2gigs (on mine anyways) is nothing.

I noticed that problem too, although not sure if it's because I installed xpize twice over each other to try and fix the theme problem.

Hrm cant seem to switch the new theme either, it's just not there, although it worked fine in Beta2.

Cant seem to get the visual styles to install, upon rebooting xpize it loads up the windows classic theme rather than the luna/royale theme?

****, just tried firefox out, cos IE6 is a bit crap, maxthon is ok but cos it half uses IE a lot of the blocking of activex controls etc messes up, and it doesnt remember all my passwords for forms. So thought i'd give firefox a try for the first time. And ****, i am impressed! This is such a nice browser, simplistic, but has everything u need/want, looks good, and well it's gotta be more secure than IE! Bit of a pointless topic I suppose, but just felt like saying how good i think it is. Gonna try out thunderbird now in hopes to replace outlook, and have already installed openoffice 2.0beta which i'm pretty impressed with too, who'd want to spend $1000 on an office solution when this seems pretty **** good on it's own for free!

Tried installing beta 1 of IE7 and I wish I hadn't now. It crashed during the install, rebooted my computer, and now IE doesnt work (just keep getting errors about the entry point in wininet.dll). Try to uninstall it in add/remove programs, and it's not there (and yes I've ticked the show updates). I assume because the installer didnt finish properly the entries for add/remove programs never got written. So I cant remove it, I cant run it, and I've tried reinstalling from the installer and that just says it's already installed please remove from add/remove programs. So what do I do? How do I get rid of this and get IE6 back???? P.S. Oh and btw, i've tried several registry cleaners, and 3rd party uninstallers with no luck.

Ok I had the following code in an HTML page: <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"> <meta name=ProgId content=Excel.Sheet> <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Excel 9"> <link rel=File-List href="./New_rota_to_040905_files/filelist.xml"> when it's in the page i get the default icon as though it cant find any icon. When I remove it, the html page has the same icon as all other html icons (the IE one). Not sure if this is helpful, but has happened since installing beta2.

Yeah no problems found on mine either yet, am liking the logon screen as well!

Yeah not bad, although looks very similar to the original logon screen though? (Not that I can really remember, I havent used the original one in a long time)

Well how about basing the new one on that one? but starting from scratch, then there's no copyright problems, ur just "inspired" by that other one

Put that logon screen on last night, and **** it looks good, nice job in finding it!!

Hey, I'm having an annoying problem on my laptop with XP. I had installed a copy of cloudmark desktop for outlook express on my laptop just for temporary use until I upgraded it by putting office on it and hence using outlook 2003. I put office on it, and obviously had to uninstall cloudmark, to put the outlook version on. Now for some reason cloudmark didn't have an uninstall entry in the add/remove programs like it usually would. So after rebooting etc and checking again, I just deleted the directory, and removed all entries I could find in the registry for it, and did a search for any files containing the word cloudmark in them and removed them too. That I thought has got to be the same as uninstalling, cos everything has gone for it. But no, I try putting the outlook version on, and I get an error saying it cannot uninstall the old version. Now there is an entry for some reason in the add/remove programs, but when trying to uninstall that from there, it comes up with an error as well. So I cant get rid of this old version, does anyone know how to remove an application completely in this circumstance? I really dont want to have to reinstall just to uninstall one app.

I agree with what most people are saying with the login screen etc. The rest of XPize rules, i love it (and will love it even more when it's out of beta and all these little bugs are fixed). But the login screen is the worst bit imo. Definately need a decent login screen to go with the rest of it, maybe even a boot screen too, although the standard XP one isn't too bad for that.

Yeah I want something similar to that, I want the welcome screen with fast user switching, but I also want ctrl-alt-del to not bring up task manager, so it goes to the usual screen with 6 buttons (one of which is task manager) and so you can lock your computer.

Hrm cant really see much of a difference but i use 10 cos it's the latest. Erm, in response to the DRM post, try ripping with other ripping software, and encoding using LAME. Microsoft are trying to stop pirating etc using trusted computing and DRM, but if u use slightly older and free tools you wont have a problem with ur ripping. I use Audiograbber which is free, and LAME MP3 codec which is free, combined they produce very nice mp3s from the source, with no copyright problems what-so-ever - never ever use a microsoft tool for things like that!

Need more of a reason to upgrade than simply getting a new skin/theme for XP (which is all longhorn is atm). All the other features of it are going to be released in a service pack for XP anyways.

I am actually starting to see that windows is just as powerful if not more powerful than linux, yes it has several brands targetted at different consumers, so u wouldnt want XP home edition running webservers etc. Having run Linux recently just for a laugh, i agree with most people that it's obscure, non-user friendly, and although partly down to the learning curve, takes a lot longer to get simple things done, especially getting ur hardware to work or installing programs. And after all an operating system biggest task is to simply provide a human interface to the hardware... Having just started my MCSE course, I am really starting to see, that from XP and windows server 2003 that windows is stable, it's easy to use, it's intuitive, everything just works, active directory, and running it all as a server I believe is really good, and works very well for all kinds of servers. A Side note, is that a lot of people say windows isn't secure because of people running as administrators, well, microsoft actively discourage this practice, and want normal users to run as users, and admins to run as power users, only using administrator when necessary. Which is what I do on my home PC, and apart from one overclocking application it all works great, I just need to use "runas" for that one, which is the same as using "su" in linux. The restarting thing that most people go on about, is not an issue, the uptimes are good in windows, and u only have to restart when install new drivers etc, or fiddle with certain settings, which is almost the same in linux, u may not have to restart the OS, but u have to restart modules, and services, which has the same effect of killing that side of ur system for a few seconds - so you may as well reboot anyways. Plus having had experience with other flavours of unix (i work with IRIX at work - although we're just moving to server 2003), even if the machine does stay up for 2 years, the hardware dies when u want to reboot it after that length of time anyway, cos bearings in the hard disks or fans go etc, so a power surge from a reboot kills it... Also the free thing, well i know not legally, but windows can be free too, which for most home users that's what they do, for businesses, well a couple hundred bucks doesnt matter much, if it does, then the business has other issues to resolve. Also if you want to take the legal route, then buy a peace of cheap hardware, and u can get an OEM copy of windows for around 80 quid, just as cheap then as most supported linux distro's.

Stargate SG1 - The Alliance!! Cant wait for it

I think longhorn is just an upgrade to XP, especially now half the features for it have been scrapped - I barely see the point in it, as things like IE7, avalon, and whatever else are all gonna be in XP SP3 or SP4 anyways.... Only things you might not get are a crappy sidebar, and windows that can wobble or some s***... Also if TC is going to be introduced in longhorn, that's a down point for it as well... Unless the philosophy on that, and on what's going to be included in longhorn changes radically, there's very little point on upgrading.

Well if TC ever comes into fruition, i dont care how few of my hardware parts dont work in linux, i might be forced to switch! I dont want that s*** on my system! Hell with TC on my system, i wont even have a system left, as it'd delete everything

Why is it people keep mis interpretting these kinds of threads, this isnt a linux is so ghey thread, it's a linux isnt ready for the desktop thread. It's a "I really want to run linux instead of windows, but I cant because a lot of things still dont work, and it's frustrating" thread. I am not against windows, or linux, but I want to run linux because I'm all for opensource. It was supposed to be a constructive article in hopes that some linux programmers or something will pick up on it, and fix those problems - so people who do want to run linux, can do so without having to spend days trying to figure out how to get a driver installed, and no matter how much u have to learn it, or windows, in windows it IS easier, which is why windows is still run on 90% of desktop machines.

Though I'd right a brief article on my experience with playing around with linux recently. I'm a fairly technical person, have a background in C/C++ programming, network support, and IT support. The last time I tried linux was approximately 5 years ago, and it wasnt very good back then, however I could see the appeal to "hackers", back then however, trying to get the latest hardware to function was next to impossible, huge lack of drivers. So since 5 years have passed and have been using XP since it was released, I thought "Let's see how Linux is getting on? I keep seeing the odd article around the web about how it's ready or almost ready for the desktop - so, let's give it a go". So after a couple days of research I picked a distribution, and no, i'm not going to name names, because overall I think it is a very good distribution, and the problems discussed in this article I believe to be irrelivant to who packaged it all up. Suffice to say it was one that had a LiveCD so I could test it out first. Asside from that I picked a boot manager and a partition utility to allow me to dual boot and resize my windows partition. So first things first, I pop the livecd in the drive, and it boots up almost to the point of starting Xwindows, however it just sits there doing nothing apparently on a black text screen whilst it says it's trying to probe my usb devices. Ok that's not a great first impression, waited about 30 minutes on that screen before rebooting it and unplugging my usb devices, that worked! So I was in, and apart from that problem, it did kinda work as you'd expect running off a CD, low res, but a few things worked like sound support etc. The interface is nice now with KDE 3.4.1, so I was quite impressed with that. So decided to install and give it a proper try. Installing is definately improved from an interface perspective, partitions, formats, detects where i'd want to install, however after that the installer wanted to format my swap partition, but again that didnt work, and just hung there, however this time, it caused linux to crash. Another reboot down the line, I turned off the format swap partition option, and it installed - YAY! Rebooting, and it all seemed fine, went straight into KDE, no USB problem this time, so perhaps was just a livecd problem. Looking through the boot log, all my hardware looks like it was picked up during boot time - I'm impressed so far! Now for an OS out of the box, it's great, things like openoffice is a very nice application, the other apps are good too, so you can see why maybe for someone who isn't going to play around much with it, it's all fine, you get a nice looking interface, and some office apps, a few games, and some other things which was all nice. Now, say you're a bit more of an advanced (windows) user, and you'd like the latest drivers to make everything run as fast as possible, perhaps for gaming, multimedia, or other such things, this is where it's still falling down. Firstly my onboard sound didnt work out of the box, fair enough I thought it rarely does in windows either. However this is where windows and linux still differ, far too much imho, whereas in windows you'd put in a CD, or go to the website and download sound drivers and just run them, they are good enough to find my hardware (which windows will put in one convenient location - aka device manager), and simply install, a reboot later, and it works - pretty much. Now I know in linux the advocates will say "you dont have to reboot", well I couldnt agree less! I had no idea how to install the sound card on my linux box - I went to my motherboard home page, and of course, no sound drivers for linux - ok i thought, but then as you all know, linux uses 3rd party drivers for a lot of stuff, and after about 1 hour of searching the web, I found out that sound support is done thru a system called ALSA. Cool, so I ran alsaconf, it detected my sound card, and said it set it up correctly and that I can now play music etc. Well that's complete rubbish, it detected my soundcard as I said, and installed some lines in modprobe.conf (whatever that is?) However after restarting the sound system in KDE it kept saying that my sound device doesnt exist. Well I'm pretty sure it does, I can see it through my transparent case, and it works in windows. So after 2 more hours of searching, I found that alsaconf messed up modprobe, and needed another line that someone in a forum gave me, after doing that - and yes rebooting, sound now works! Hrm difficult for a first time linux user? Yes, impossible for someone who's not a computer buff? Yes I'd say so. But I was still happy at that point, sound was working, and in the process I did learn a little bit more about linux. Next time I'll know what to do, and wont take me as long. So now I thought it's time to get some more of my hardware working - surprisingly my digital camera was painless to install, and could be installed through the kde gui interface. My scanner caused some problems, but after an hour of poking around on the web, and finding there's some hacks with other drivers and some files from the windows drivers, you can get it to work, and it did. However again, hardware support was bad there, but at least the community could help me out, and get it working. This would not be an easy job though for a computer n00b. Linux also had direct support it seemed for my webcams, as I found gnome meeting icons on the desktop with a connection to both my usb webcams - so went through setting them up, although that didnt work either, and I was left with a green webcam image. I must admit I was getting frustrated by this point, so left them for later, as I wanted more of a gaming machine at that point anyway, so moved on to graphics drivers, to get opengl working with hardware acceleration. I have an ATI radeon X800 pro in my box, so I went to the ATI site, and proceeded to install it, the installer went through, detected I was running xorg, so installed the drivers for that. Great! I thought, finally something easy as ATI support my card properly. But when I got to the end, it said I had to run kgfrlxconf (or something to that name, i'm in windows now and cant remember the name of the file). Thought that was odd, in windows I just run the installer, reboot, and it works, full 3D, full gaming, full access to all features of my card. But ok, this is linux, it will do things a bit differently, and I'm all for that, so I ran the configuration. There were several options in there which took me some thinking before I could answer the questions, but got through it - there is no way in hell that a computer n00b would have any clue about this, but I suppose a n00b doesnt really install new drivers, or do they? But anyway I got through it, although I was quite concerned as it kept going on about firegl cards and I dont have one of them! But ok, I figured it may just be reading from a text file and forgotten to include the radeon cards in there. Gave the computer a reboot after this, and got back into KDE, although it had messed my trackball settings up and now my mouse wheel wasnt working, although luckily I knew how to fix that pretty quickly. Tried out opengl, but surprise surprise, the drivers werent installed properly, and I was running using software emulation which was VERY slow. So tried reinstalling, several times, to see if it's some options I got wrong, but no, never worked. Then I tried the xorg RPM installer from ATI, this also had the same effect. I then had to scour the web again to find a solution, couldnt find many solutions to this, found some thing about kernel sources and recompiling the AGP support or something, but that wasn't working correctly either, so all in all after 10 hours of trying to figure these drivers out - nothing! No open-gl. Now some people might find this fun, and some of you might read this and think, the sort of person I am, ur surprised why i'm not enjoying this "hacking". Well if I wanted to have to recompile a kernel to get something as simple as AGP, and my graphics card working, or have to try and fiddle around with text files to get things configured correctly (in windows u never have to touch the registry or any ini files unless u want to, things still work) then I would have been on the kernel development team - but no, i'm not interested in that, I want my hardware to work, and work fast, I want my operating system to operate the computer correctly, and not require hours of frustration and work just to get simple things to work right. I want to do the things that I enjoy doing on computers, like gaming, or writing programs for the operating system, or internet use, or video editing etc. By this time, I was in such a mood with it, that I wiped it, and went back to XP, and I was so happy to be back as well! Everything was working! So that is my experience with linux, and although it has improved leaps and bounds since 5 years ago - it is still a pain. And not as easy as some articles might lead you to believe. Now will it ever be? I think so, looking at the improvements, and maybe by the time KDE4 is out, and another year down the line, it could well be competitive to longhorn - but is it competitive with XP now? Hell no.

Noooooooooooo, not a mac!!

Hey, the folders were placed on my desktop after installing ms activesync, and the software for my HP iPaq. If you want to know anything else about them, let me know.

Thanks The sidebar is a theme i made for samurize (http://www.samurize.com) - get that, and my theme is also on the site under the downloads section. The wall paper changing, is part of the XP power toys pack - which can be found on Microsofts site, or through google.