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Open this on firefox, opera and internet explorer.
Whenever you focus the window with the page open, regardless of whch browser CPU usage goes to 80%, 90%.

http://www.themexp.org/preview.php?mid=126617&type =vs&view=date&page=&cat=&name=Royale+Vista+VS.zip

There are a few inside pages on gamespot, lycos UK and other websties, and it happens in all browsers.

A friend of mine said, javascript is causing it, in case of lycos. the link i pasted above i found 10 minutes ago.

like really should not any of the 3 make sure the browser doesn't eat the CPU out, and put a stop at whatever is causing it, or place some restriction not to let the browser eat the CPU.

Commercial or Opensource, it is your product, and you have to fix it.

I first noted CPU usage increases in FF 0.9 Opera 7 . IE I am not using it over 1 year but IE 6 I guess. It is still here. :) Well actually I just had to END TASK my FF, because I opened too many of links like above. Same if i had been using Opera or IE.

It's starting to look very nice!

With a patch like this you can use the windows xp native skinning engine to apply themes like these for free, without sacrifycing performance, and make your XP look like Longhorn (or Mac or what you like).

You can also download a free program to change your logon screen.

What I really wanted to see were the new innovations that were supposed to be shipped with Longhorn, like the new filesystem. Sadly, some of them will be missing in order to meet the deadlines.

Cheers,
Adolfo

I too used to like those amuzing proggies, but now I'm near afraid to download a NO-CD crack for a game I purchased, or a serial generator for an old game I lost the cover for. Spy/Ad/Mal/ware is filthing up the net way too much. My evidence follows:

Exibit A:

A friend of mine and I decided to play with PhotoShop and 3D Studio one night and come up with wallpapers. We've all done it hu? After completing our masterpieces we decided to give something back to the community so we uploaded our works to ThemeXP.org. This at the time new website was gaining popularity and looked innocent enough to give our art away to. It wasnt until almost one year later that I checked on my friends wallpaper on ThemeXP.org at this location and found that not only was the wallpaper doing alright having been downloaded 758 times, but the wallpaper had been encapsulated in spyware! A WALLPAPER, WITH SPYWARE! WTF have we come to. The site had a note at the bottom which said:

* This author has generously allowed us to wrap this file to help keep our costs down.

My friend does not remember clicking any checkbox saying it was ok to shit on his wallpaper with crapware, but then again nor does he remember not checking a box. At this point it doesnt really matter, it wasnt that good of a wallpaper. I dont feel sorry for my buddy, I feel bad for the 758 people who downloaded the crap-ridden wallpaper.

Large buttons are always better when it comes to the hit/miss ratio. You don't want to be in a typing/mousing fury and hit the wrong button! Keyboards could be made to an unusable small scale, or made gigantic, but the current size was picked because it fits the average human fingers, I assume MS did the same thing with the GUI, found what worked for most people, but you have a lot of outliers (Grandmas, Dads, kids, etc.) throwing the curve off.

I like the blue Luna theme but use this instead, but I think you and me are the only two people who like the new start menu.

Aqua is really slick, but eventually it gets old, wheras there are dozens of really nice looking themes for KDE

(do you mean Luna, XP's default visual style, or did you really mean Aqua, OS X's interface?) This article was more about icons than look & feel. While many people may not like the Playschool look of the Luna widgets, I've never heard anyone complain about the new icons.

However, if you want to talk about look & feel, you can change that in XP just as well as in KDE. ThemeXP has a bunch of good themes (called "Visual Styles" for XP), and you can either search Google for the uxtheme.dll hack to allow you to use those themes, or pay for TGTSoft's StyleXP (TGTSoft used to host a free hack for uxtheme.dll, but it no longer worked on XP SP1; thus you should search google for the hack if you don't feel like buying StyleXP).

Unlike Fisher-Price toys, Win XP does not have to stay green and chunky. You can apply your own themes. Not just colours, but complete skins.

- Oisin

Just a small addendum:
They only have spyware in the downloads marked with a red star. It still sucks though and the site should be shunned, in my opinion.

Microsoft does make it possible to create new themes. People do create them, in fact there are thousands and thousands of them out there.

Agreed. This modified version is even better. I've kept it as my VS since I discovered it. Every time I try to use another, I always end up going back to it.

It could use a few more color schemes, granted, but I'm also a sucker for blue, so I'm fine with the Ergonomic. After all, it's not the theme authoring community's fault that the VS system generally sucks compared to KDE's styling system, and can't create entirely new color schemes on the fly.

Interestingly enough, I don't really like the Quartz window decoration in KDE at all. Instead, I'm hooked on Plastik. Go figure.

[KDE] Windows respond to mouse overs after the time I specified, right number of desktops with the correct visibility of other apps, themability also a big plus. Don't know if XP has themability or to what degree but I don't consider it a major function.

All of that is available in Windows. Get TweakUI from the Power Toys page and you can enable X-Mouse if you like focus-follows-mouse functionality (personally, I don't like it, but to each his own). You can also theme XP with StyleXP from TGTSoft (or if you don't want to pay, you can find the uxtheme.dll hack on google -- search for "uxtheme.dll SP1", no quotes). Tons of themes are available.

However I do prefer the KMenus method for listing large numbers of programs as a heirarchy, when Windows tries to list 3 full columns at once it's much too slow especially since you probably already know the location of the item you're looking for.

That's just organization. There's nothing stopping you from organizing your Program Files menu on the Start Menu in Windows. KDE has a nice organization because it comes with a lot of apps to begin with. Windows on the other hand tends to rely on separate software, and each installer wants to have its own top-level menu. Don't let it. Some apps play nice, like all of Microsoft Games Studio's games -- they all install under "Microsoft Games" rather than having one menu for each game. So, organize the menu if you don't like the default.

Also KDE gets points for multiple desktops, yes I know that you can get programs for Windows to mimic that but it doesn't work as well, most notably it simply hide apps so that cycling through apps in one desktop gives you apps for all desktops. The file manager for windows is generally nicer but the combination of file manager and CLI built in for KDE should give it the advantage there but I'll call it a tie.

Try the Virtual Desktop Manager, again from Power Toys. It does multiple desktops correctly, though it does have some other issues. Also, I guess I'm not familiar with KDE's file manager/CLI (I assume you mean Konqueror?), but remember that the Konqueror design is essentially Explorer/Internet Explorer's design -- it's really little more than a container for other objects. There's a Power Toy to open a command prompt from a folder, or you could try something like this instead, a command prompt explorer bar to put a CLI directly in the explorer window. Is that what you mean KDE does?

Sure, right out of the box KDE is more configurable and has a little more functionality (virtual desktops, mostly). But with a little work and using only that which is built into Windows or Power Toys provided by Microsoft directly (ie, not replacing your shell with something like LiteStep, or paying for something like StarDock's WindowBlinds) you can make Windows (XP) do everything that made you choose KDE over Windows. The only thing Windows can't do is run on top of Linux :).

What, nobody is predicting that the announcement will be that Apple's decided to port OSX to x86 architecture? Crap. I guess I'll have to satisfy myself with these themes and programss for Windows XP until Apple decides to appease me.

If you don't like it, change it. No commercial software is required.

I'm running a sci-fi-esque shiny black theme right now, and it works perfectly. It even replaced the huge Start menu button with one that's much more manageable.

I proudly use this version of Windows XP, and I've never had any problems with Windows Update. I even use SP1. Maybe your friend was using the infamous Devil's Own key?

"...at least 3-4 times faster than the Athlon XP 1900+ running XP..."

What? Sorry, that's complete bullshit (unless you only have 128MB RAM.) I've run XP Pro on 600MHz machines, 400MHz machines, etc. It runs beautifully on anything above about 500MHz (and fine, albeit more slowly, on anything above 300MHz.) You just have to have more RAM than 128MB -- 256MB is a bare minimum, and all my personal machines are 768 or above. RAM is the easiest and cheapest upgrade you can do to a system, anyway.

I don't know about LiteStep, but if you're using Explorer, go into Display Properties -> Appearance -> Advanced and turn off the Transition Effect. Also, in Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> first Settings button, you can turn off a lot of stuff that may use video memory if you have an older video card. I turned off all the Fade effects. BTW, I used to use LiteStep, but with themexp, it's no longer worth it. You can just theme XP now and it looks and feels better than LiteStep ever did.

This is silly. You made the effort to make Linux faster, but you don't seem to understand how to make XP faster. XP really does rock on older systems -- you just have to know how to tweak it (like ANY OS.)

No, it's not. My task bar is two rows high, one for app buttons, one for toolbars. The Start button is on the top row, not the bottom one.

You're right, I missed this case because I never use a stretched-out taskbar. Quick Launch goes over on the side of the screen, single-line taskbar goes at the bottom. In its single-line configuration, the start button is infinitely deep along the screen edges (again, at least in the Luna theme, maybe not in classic).

It has nothing to do with IE. Many applications open windows that way. Part of the problem is that Windows allows this pseudo-maximisation without detecting that the window occupies the full desktop (or maybe almost all of it, with some tolerance) and snapping it into true maximised mode.

True, but I've never seen any app psuedo-maximized other than IE when browsing "bad" (*cough*pr0n*cough*) sites. IE shouldn't allow that, or should allow for some way to programmatically go maximized via script if people must have this feature. (I guess on lower resolution screens, you might have windows that open up covering the entire desktop without being maximized, but XP won't let you run in anything less than 800x600 unless you really force it). Yes, maybe Windows should do some sort of detection on almost-maximized windows. I bet you could write a small app that would do that.

None of this changes the fact that the rounded corners suck from a usability perspective anyway. Some of us tile windows side-by-side when using two versions of the same program on different documents. Your window isn't maximised, but you still have cornering issues.

If you're running tiled, the worst that can happen is you click on the space under the window. However, the rounding of the corners is only a few pixels, so you have to really be mousing for it to hit that. Anyway, if you don't like rounded windows, do something about it (btw, the tgtsoft page has the freely-available uxtheme patcher, so you can patch your uxtheme.dll and use different visual styles without having to buy StyleXP).

When i say "skins", i mean the so-called "XP styles". To use any of these XP styles besides the Microsoft ones (that is to say, Luna), you have to replace a Windows DLL with a modified one. This site features many of these styles (and yes, most of them are INCREDIBLY lame, but there are a few (very few) good ones). These have NOT been supported since Windows 95, without the use of third-party software such as Windowblinds.

And second, what the fuck does putting them in different categories have ANYTHING to do with objectivity? No shit they can be put in the same category, what's your point? Perhaps you should check this out:

objectivity
n : judgment based on observable phenomena and uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices

Lots of things can be put in the same category if you nitpick hard enough.

Movie destops also have an excessive amount of animation. Trust me, you'd hate any desktop that worked that way -- it'd run like absolute molasses.

Kinda like Mac OS X, eh? Yeah, yeah, it's getting better, but it's still pretty slow compared to other operating systems with less flash.

The user experience I've had that most closely resembles a movie desktop is application built using Flash, like you find on web sites and enhanced CDs. These apps try to emulate the look and feel of movie desktops.

Interestingly, most of those movie GUIs are built using Macromedia Director (or similar), so building the same thing out of Flash makes sense. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those movie web sites actually took most of the code directly from the mock-up made for the movie itself. It shouldn't be difficult to do.

Personally, I like usability with a bit of flash. Something like Window Maker, while very useable (it should be, since it's based on NeXT), is rather boring. Enlightenment, while flashy, isn't that useable in my opinion. In that vein, I'm pretty happy with Windows XP. It's themeable (link is down at the moment, but according to the notice it should be back up in a half an hour -- I doubt that, but check back in a day or two), so I can get my eye candy, but it's also very useable. Say what you will, Microsoft has spent a small fortune on useability testing, and most of what they've done works well. Brush it off as familiarity if you will, but there are concrete examples of Windows useability getting better (small example: the Start button now has infinite borders, just like the Apple menu in Mac OS -- throw the mouse down to the lower left and click, you'll get the start menu).

that and XP is ugly, so much fluff. i hate the colors and the 3d style bars. give me a win2k anyday, (or linux with kde which can be made to look different with ease)

ThemeXP is a site that you may find interesting, then. With a hack provided by TGTSoft to make XP not require visual styles be signed by Microsoft, you can change your theme to one of hundreds of themes out there. Don't like Luna or Classic? Find, go find something you do like over at ThemeXP. XP visual styles have really been maturing lately. When TGTSoft first did their hack, every theme released was just a recoloration or minor hack on Luna, or an attempt to copy Aqua. Now, there are some very neat, very professional-looking original themes out there. Check it out.

that and XP is ugly, so much fluff. i hate the colors and the 3d style bars. give me a win2k anyday, (or linux with kde which can be made to look different with ease)

ThemeXP is a site that you may find interesting, then. With a hack provided by TGTSoft to make XP not require visual styles be signed by Microsoft, you can change your theme to one of hundreds of themes out there. Don't like Luna or Classic? Find, go find something you do like over at ThemeXP. XP visual styles have really been maturing lately. When TGTSoft first did their hack, every theme released was just a recoloration or minor hack on Luna, or an attempt to copy Aqua. Now, there are some very neat, very professional-looking original themes out there. Check it out.

And I do not say that XP is better than MacOS or Linux.

What I say is XP is far better than 9x/NT/2k.

On the other hand I am a GNOME user, most of the time. But I prefer XP to older windowsen.

[ And Aqua theme for XP is better than Aqua theme for KDE (Liqiud, etc.) or GNOME (choose any one). ]

2. Of course, Apples hardware and software divisions are 'in cahoots' (if I were a stockholder, I'd hope so, they work at the same freakin company) .. they might not be 'in cahoots' to add this feature, drop that feature for driving each others sales. But it doesn't take a market analyst to understand that hardware people /rely/ on software people to push the latest and greatest to push hardware. It might not be a conspiracy, but the hardware camp leaning on the software camp to drive demand for various types of hardware, and vice versa is called 'business strategy'. Hell, its in the press releases. Thats the truely funny part about both conspiracy theorists and their naysayers who deny all intentions of said conspiracy. While the methods of using leverage across hard/soft-ware markets might not be as in the dark or 'cool' as the tinhats might like it to be, it still stands that tactics like this are used. It's kind of funny - it seems people are often more complacent of 'intent to conspire', so long as its done in plain view. I still dont think it excuses cases where that leverage is taking precendance over solid engineering design.

I think the difference between what I'm trying to say and what you're trying to say is this: you make it seem as though making software slower is the goal. I don't believe so. Yes, software drives hardware, and yes, newer software typically runs slower on older hardware. That's not because the developers set out to make the software run slow on old hardware. Instead, the idea is that as hardware advances, so can software. To give an example, let's look at Windows XP. The fancy new gui can be a bit of a resource hog. However, Microsoft has provided very granular controls to turn off the effects you don't want, or even switch back to the "Classic" style (which is actually native controls, not pixmaps that look like the old style). If the goal here was to slow XP down on old computers, those features would not have been provided. Instead, the goal was that as computer hardware advances, Windows can do some more cool presentational things. Don't like those, or your machine can't handle it? Turn them off. Windows XP runs just as well on an old p200 (with a liberal amount of RAM) as did Windows 2000. But if you have the hardware, why not take advantage and have a nicer looking display (if you don't like the Luna style, check out ThemeXP). Same goes for OS X. The goal was not to make the new OS slow on older G3s to drive G4 purchases. Instead, it was that the new hardware gives more processing power that can be used on trivial things like all the fancy alpha blending and scaling in OS X. The X.1 patch sped things up, not slowing them down to force people into buying dual 833 G4s (or whatever).

A business decision that consists of, "Let's make things slower so that people will upgrade their hardware," is a bad idea. Something more along the lines of, "Today's hardware is more powerful than that of two years ago, so let's use it. People will probably need to upgrade, but c'est la vie," is much more acceptable. Same end result (more or less), but the means are different.

As far as stability? hard to say. at work my XP Pro workstation never BSOD's (like 98SE did) but it locks up solid probably around a dozen times a day, requiring a trip to the reset button.

This is highly indicative of some sort of hardware problem (maybe the machine's overheating?). Rather than just assuming that it's XP and living with it, try hunting down the problem.

I also find its "cutesy-wutesyness" slightly offensive, but that's just me.

So use the Classic theme. Or head on over to ThemeXP and get a different visual style for XP. If you don't like the Luna interface, there are plenty of other options (none of which include "using the Luna interface and bitching about it"). You can turn off other "cutesy" things, too, like the fancy login screen (just turn off "fast user switching", or connect to a domain or AD), so there's no use complaining about those either.

Windows XP contains theme support. You can get themes here. However, to actually use themes not signed by microsoft, you need an additional shareware program that costs $20 for long-term activation (this program is not written by MS). Seems to work pretty well, although the themes don't apply equally to all apps.

Blackcomb was supposed to be nt 5.2, but they made it 6.0 so that longhorn can become 5.2. If you want your XP system to look like Blackcomb, right here, right now, do the following.

1 Load Style XP onto your XP system.

2 Choose one of the many styles from this site, themexp.org in which I did a simple recursive search for blackcomb. There is even one for "The Matrix" lovers.

3 Change your splash screen. These are also on the link above.

"Apple's Copyright - 02.13.02 @ 6:18 PM EST

Apple has contacted ThemeXP and notified us that we are in violation of Apple's copyright on OS X by hosting two themes: "EclipseOSX v4.40" and "MacOSX Aqua 3.2". As much as we enjoy long and expensive lawsuits against mega-corporations, we decided to comply with their notice of infringement and take down both of the two themes we previously hosted."

My reaction on this is mixed. I realize that the look and the UI are an important part of the Apple experience, but Apple now has a solid OS foundation and there's no way one can turn Windows XP into OS X by just slapping a skin on it. I think they should loosen up a little and try to convince users by displaying technical excellence rather than by turning their legal wolfpack loose. Your opinions?