I have fallen in love with the entire inspirat desktop theme thingy, it rocks



Desktop Theme
Inspirat 2

Desktop Background
Siren 22

Winamp Skin
Inspirat Winamp Theme

FireFox
Inspirat FireFoX Theme

Windows Icons
Inspirat Inspired Windows Icons

Eh, I like windows classix 10x better, and I'm currently using one of the chaninja styles. But that's the best firefox/mozilla skin I've seen so far, thanks.

people use music programs other than itunes? never would have thought....

And i love backgrounds like that.....adding noise to spheres is fun hehe.

I don't have the skill or knowhow to make a kickass theme for my computers.

Ah well

What's an itune?

Here is my background. Usually it's much more fancy, but I like this pic from last Jan.

Is there any convincing reason to switch to iTunes from Winamp? I'm not being sarcastic or anything, I'd use it if I thought it were better. Winamp supports my Remote Wonder, which is why I use it.

"people use music programs other than itunes? never would have thought.... "

Odd, I would have phrased it:

"people use music programs other than winamp? never would have thought.... "

Vilk

What stuff are we not allowed to see!!?!

Inquiring minds need to know!!

How do you load this?
I figured to give it a go just to see what it was like, but I can't figure out how to load it.

It takes a fair bit of hacking around to install. Will get back to you on a howto

Edit : There is a readme.txt file in the zip which guides you through installing this.

not in my zip file...?

Here ya go

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=140707

Install that so you can use the style with winxp.

I wouldn't use iTunes if I didn't have to (I have an iPod). It's incredibly draining on system resources, especially for a simple music player. :(

/Ephphod

oh come one, you know you love programs like itunes that insist on running on START UP, using resources the ENTIRE time your computer is on even if you ARENT acctually listening to music at all.


< has to disable that captacular pos program on a regular basis when working on other people slow ass underperfoming computers. the thing reminds me of real player.


winamp is the win.

Here's my desktop, sized down from 1600x1200.

As you can see I like to avoid clutter. =P

In case you're interested I use the following utilities/programs:

Shell (what you see at the bottom)
------------------------------
Geoshell: I have replaced explorer.exe with this shell. I use the Terminal skin.

Geoshell uses far less RAM then explorer does, and is fully customizable as long as you do your homework. It's got a lot of nice plug-ins too.

I use the program Carapace, which allows you, upon bootup, to choose between explorer or Geoshell by hitting the Win+W or Win+G key.

I just use (from left to right at the things on the bottom of the desktop) the GeoMenuLaunch for a little StartMenu, GeoCommandTime, which allows me to click on it and use it as a command line tool, and GeoTray, which is just a tray.

Calendar
---------------------------
I use the Rainlendar program, which places a skinnable calendar on my desktop. It has a nice TODO list feature too. I use the Shadow3 skin, which I think comes with it.

File Explorer
----------------------
Because I've given up on Explorer.exe, I switched to the free and infinitely better xplorer2 lite. It's got a smaller footprint and dual panes, among other features.

Object Dock (What you see at the top)
------------------------------------------------
This is a free utility from Stardock that is also fully customizeable and works like the dock in Mac OSX. It's slick and has plug-ins like the weather one you see on mine.

I found my background, Shiny Black Tabs at Wincustomize.com in their ObjectDock section.

Some of the icons you see on my dock I downloaded from there (Notepad (I use TextPad),Calculator, Flash, and Director), but I'm also creating a set of spherical icons for all the progs I use (the rest are mine). You see some of them on my dock, but there is also the first of my WoW series which will include at least one from each race, if not both male and female, using diff colors and textures), as well as one for Out of the Park Baseball 6, or OOTP6.

I'm working on getting my entire dock full of different color spheres, since I think it looks nifty against the dock background.

The only problems I've had with all these progs are:

1) If no windows are open and you click on the desktop, the ObjectDock disappears, and you have to alt+tab or click on the Geoshell tool to make it come back. I think this may be a Geoshell+ObjectDock wierdness.

2) Starting today, my GeoTray portion has started flashing every 5-10 seconds a little. It's annoying and I don't know why yet.

Running that alternate shell and those plugins I'm curious as to how much resources those use.

Tan

The latest build of Geoshell exhibits some varying memory usage, moreso than in the previous one I think. Most of the time it's between 5 and 10, sometimes 15 mbs.

Rainlender never uses more than 5MB.

ObjectDock tends to use 2-8 MBs.

I never see my desktop during the day, as I usually have at least 5 diff progs open at once, so desktop shortcuts are fairly worthless to me. The dock gives me the functionality of the taskbar, and geoshell gives me the rest, but it takes up much less real estate on the screen, and is fully customizable. I've seen explorer.exe take up 3 times the memory all of these tools combined do, and way more than geoshell tends to.

But then geoshell is constantly being tweaked and optimized so the memory usage will go up and down amongst builds.

[edit: At home, those tools are using:

Geoshell: 3.4 mb
ObjectDock: 4.8mb
Rainlendar: 800k
xplorer2: 2.9mb
]

http://imh.dirtytrain.com//upload_files/desktop2.jpg

That's my current desktop at 1600x1200. Running litestep (heavily modified HackerOS theme... had to remove all the excess crap I didn't want/need), right click on the desktop for a type of modified start menu.

H8 icon clutter.

What anime is that from Drole?

IIRC it's fan art of Sailor Saturn or somethin like that.