XP Styles or Winblinds - Performance hit?

[Paladine]

Here is my question about using Styles or Winblind type themes mods for windows xp. Is there any more of a performance hit, over the standard XP themes, on the system?

[Tekmaven]

Windows Blinds do have a proformance hit on your computer.

The other Visual Styles use the XP Theme Engine, and you shouldn't have a problem or a performance hit with them.

[Paladine]

Thanks Tekmaven!

[Dani]

As in "other visual styles" are you referring to TGTSoft's StyleXP?

[senterstyle]

Actually it all depends in the style theme you're using. I used to use blinds, but then switched to another shell... SharpE, although it's still in beta it works extremely well. It takes a short time to learn, is very good for frequent Windows users, but the best thing is the plugins.

[Paladine]

Yes, TGTSoft's Style XP. Just starting to see some good themes!

[Dani]

The latest version of WindowsBlinds seems to only work on WindowsXP. Does that mean that it, too, uses Windows built-in theme engine? Or at least is a lot better than it used to be?

[jinx]

Just thought I would relate my experience with Windowblinds and Object Desktop. I'm running Xp Sp1 by the way. I just finished uninstalling Object Desktop (which wasn't easy to say the least) and i'll never try it again. First of all, I had over ten crashes in two days where I usually average one every two weeks after I installed Object Desktop and picked a skin and a cursor set from Cursor XP. I mean full fatal error, reboot crashes too. second after I turned everything off I tried to use one tool at a time so using windowblinds from the IE tools menu I picked a skin and after that IE would not start. I went to the IE folder and clicked the .exe and it did not even show up as a process. After a reboot it still acted the same even after turning everything to do with Stardock off. So I went to uninstall everything and did with all the programs from Object Destop I could find. After that I reboot and IE still wouldn't come up. I had to manually delete every folder and regkey to finally get IE working again. I have p4 2.8 gig 768 ddr Asus system. It's fast and when all this was going on I tried opening a project in Vs.net and I had an unbelivable performance drop. Blah, blah I know this is a long story but I thought you guys might wanna know what I went thru.
Anyway, maybe you'll have better luck.

[Paladine]

My luck was the same jinx.

I tried for a 3rd time (charm right? ....nope!)... and still had too much of a performance lag. So much for Themes in XP.

[Dani]

I tried WindowBlinds years and years ago with Windows 98. When Windows XP came out, I tried WindowBlinds again, hated it, then switched to StyleXP, and will never switch back.

[Dani]

Incidently, when I had WindowBlinds on Win98, I was enthralled with the idea of being able to skin windows - something never before seen. However, the performance hit was definitely devistating.