It is a great bit of kit - even looked out the window to check it was working - LOL!
[Reply]

Some cool additions to your desktop. Vista icons in XP I see!

Could you list what extra you have installed to produce that desktop? I would be interested to know. That moon clock is great too.

I once installed Stardock to play around and customise an XP system and that was very quickly removed again. It had huge system resource overheads and was quite unstable at the time.
[Reply]

I agree, you have to be careful and I'm quite similar in requiring low resource usage for desktop apps. I usually check how much they're using the hard drive or banging the registry, although with a monitoring app you will get registry use nearly every second.

The stuff on my pic are all very light on resources. Uses about 30MB of RAM in total; 20MB if you use a calendar widget rather than a stand alone program like I have.

The programs in use are:

Theme - Royale remixed (you'll have to patch your UXTheme.dll file, as Microsoft don't allow third party themes by default. If you don't want to do that, take a look at zune or other official themes). Brilliant theme, highly compatible (I've had no issues) and very good to look at. Comes with the default wallpaper shown and the icons.

Mac like dockbar - RocketDock (uses very little CPU also).

Calender with scheduling facilities - Rainlendar lite

Widgets, desktop monitors - Rainmeter (also check out Samurize).

Can't remember where all the original scripts came from for Rainmeter, you'll have to search (there are hundreds of themes I was browsing at the time).

I had a little tidy up yesterday and rewrote some of the scripts to update less often and look a little better:
[Reply]

Here is my current Windows XP desktop. I don't really use Windows XP much though.

http://stevecoates.net/stuff/desktop300910.jpg

Here is the cool background image: http://stevecoates.net/stuff/a500bg.jpg
Which came from this photograph: http://stevecoates.net/photos/fp4/35a500.jpg

I'm not sure whether that is my own A500+, or the one which ED209 sent me.

And if you enjoy seeing black and white photographs of computers which were taken with 50mm/f1.8 lenses, here is one of my current PC's motherboard: http://stevecoates.net/photos/fp4/11motherboard.jpg.
[Reply]

Windows 7 Ult. 64 bit. Nothing Too special but I like it.


[Reply]

There are some great images available via NASA. Very nice.

Opening this thread, I just realised I'm still using the same main Star Wars wallpaper as I was back on the first page of this thread. I've yet to find anything better, and it has followed me over to a newer system. I do however change the other Star Wars images on the other 2 monitors collected to the same system. Currently I have quite a cool light saber images from Force Unleashed concept art.

2686118392_bb8d90d705_o.jpg
[Reply]

Star Wars Desktops are always cool, I think there should be great images coming up from Star Wars the Force Unleashed if the trailers so far are anything to go by.
[Reply]

I'm moving over to Windows 7 64-bit now via a dual boot, but still tend to use XP 32-bit for many things as it's setup just as I like it (pics above). Change is hard.

Now I'm forcing the move to Windows 7 and looking to leave XP behind for day to day stuff. At the moment, everything is mostly default, but I'll change that soon. To my surprise, I now find a vertical taskbar is much more efficient with modern widescreen monitors, aided by the way Windows 7 stacks windows onto one icon with progress bars and without labels! The taskbar at the bottom was designed for 4:3 monitors back in the day, so I forced myself to try something new. Took a few hours to get used to it, but now I can't go back.

In my opinion, much of the widescreen monitor space is wasted left and right of the desktop, with a limited vertical resolution for applications but too much resolution horizontally. So why waste vertical space with a taskbar? Let your browser have it - it needs it more! I'll probably place a mac style dock launcher along the bottom now with auto hide. Since very few menus exist on the bottom now, it won't get activated and popup by accident.

Here is what I mean (won't be everyone's cup of tea, and may interfere if you run multi-monitors side-by-side):
[Reply]

I don't think I could get on with the taskbar at the side, and love the Win7 dock feature, with stacking icons, so you need keep having loads of extra program tabs across the bottom of the screen. That idea really was a huge improvement to the OS. And widescreen monitors for me are great for anything timeline based such as video editing or flash. Also for me most applications have a lot of control panels around the screen, so a wider screen is great to keep those off to the side.

I do agree that for websites and reading anything like a PDF or other documents move vertical real estate is definitely needed. Some people even have a widescreen monitor setup in portrait for this next to their main monitor, which is an interesting solution.
[Reply]

Most people will agree with you Harrision. We are talking taskbar at bottom since the Windows 95 days!!! It's like a tradition.

It felt so wrong to me at first, never looked right when I saw others with it at the side in past years, but I've found it works best for me now I've gone 1080p combined with the all new Windows 7 stacking taskbar.

I can see how some apps with huge menus left and right would conflict - like photoshop! But there is still plenty of space.
[Reply]