Yet Another WindowBlinds Horror Story!

[DrMoreau]

I've toyed with the idea of trying this eyecandy software for some time. I did a search here and read about some of the problems people had and I read about the problems with it in other forums and reviews. But I finally decided to try it for myself and see about this.

I'm using Win2k and after making my windows look very pretty and adding some new and cool features, like the roll-up, I decided that the resource hit wasn't too bad since I have 640MB of memory.

So I continued to use it for another four or five days then unloaded it to see just how much I noticed the performace hit. I immediately noticed how Explorer and IE opened up much faster without it. Of course this was expected since WB's rendering of bitmaps is going to slow things down a bit. I kept WB unloaded but still installed to give myself time to decide if I wanted to continue using it anyway and accept the performance hit for some eyecandy.

This is when WindowBlinds started to act like a scorned b!tch. I started getting random BSOD's stating something about NTOSKRNL.exe being corrupted and various other annomolies that I've never had since I started using Win2k over a year ago. I uninstalled WB and replaced NTOSKRNL which seemed to clear up the random BSOD's except when playing certain games. Looks like I'm headed for another restore now. (Thank goodness for ghost images!)

So anyway, I can't believe why they'd charge for software that is notorious for trashing people's systems. Nor can I understand why anyone would even pay for it after reading all the horror stories. I also made a skin using their Skin Editor software. Again, a very very buggy program (I often had to restart the program just to see the changes I had made) that they want me to pay for to own the registered version.

Thanks Stardock, But NO THANKS!

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

yeah stardock stuff is buggy, i mean come on, they're hacking an OS which does not want to be hacked. run linux or BSD and you can make your windows look like whatever the hell you want, and it'll still be a million times more reliable 😀

 

[DrMoreau]

<< yeah stardock stuff is buggy, i mean come on, they're hacking an OS which does not want to be hacked. run linux or BSD and you can make your windows look like whatever the hell you want, and it'll still be a million times more reliable 😀 >>



True, MS software doesn't get along well with other programs wanting to alter it so that might take some of the blame away from Stardock. But on the other hand I use shell replacements like LiteStep and even though Windows might act odd in some circumstances since the Explorer shell has been replaced, it's not nearly as buggy as WB. I can also uninstall these programs and still have my system intact, unlike WB. Their Skin Editor is also buggy and that has nothing to do with it hacking the OS since it's a standalone skinning program.

Maybe one of these days I'll get around to learning Linux....

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

yeah, its not all MS's fault, stardock makes some flakey stuff too.

feel free to join the linux camp, you'll learn to love it 😀

 

[Cable God]

Plus it's a resource hog from my experiences with it.

 

[sandorski]

It's too bad that it doesn't work. I use Litestep for one of my WinXP accounts and previously with Win98SE. I love the variety of themes and the features, unfortunetly though Litestep only changes the desktop appearance and function and not borders of windows and what not. MS can make a decent OS, but their concept of styling just plain sucks.