Take it from someone who has it, WINDOWS XP is not cool, its full of skinning oppourtunity, but its so user friendly its painful, feel like a toddler, anyway i found a cool trick/tip, and i have no where to voice it, so for those of ye who have it. ... TRANSPARENT ICONS, to make any icon dissapere, change the icon to shell32.dll(its full of icons, in the middle of it, there will be a 3 icon big, soace, with nothing in it, these are transparent icons, i havent had any problems with it, and its cool, there should be an option to take of all icons on the dektop all together, and just leave the text.
XP Rocks! sure the "Luna" theme may look pre-school but the silver colour scheme kicks ass! plus you can use Windowsblinds XP which incorperates itself right into the display panel allowing you to use any windows blind skin. PLus its the most stable windows yet.
There shouldn't be much trouble making transparent icons. Just use and program like microangelo to make an icon filled with the color 'transparent' and I think it should work. I haven't tried to actually do it, but it's worth a shot.
Celeronizer.. I recommend putting a 2K install on there for safety... I've known XP to fuck itself over before... it happened to me... and if it's on the same HD as your XP installation, it'll get screwed, too.
I'm just happy that there is another doze OS that can read and write the NTFS file system. This means I can dual boot Win2k Server, and XP and fix each others issues if one OS burns out. This is good for the security of your data.
I've been running XP beta RC2 for a while now and I really must say that I like the way it handles multiple logins. I'll probably set up a login just for rendering animations and switch user ID's while that process is working so as to make sure no-one accidentally interrupts the render job.
I think the UI is fine but only after you go through the effort of reverting it back to classic as much as you can.
If the Beta is any accurate representation I'd say that Win2k is the most stable MS OS release as of yet. I've hosed WinXP a number of times now.
i am eventually starting to feel a little afraid for the behalf of this entire windows skinning community. it strongly seems like i belong to the little minority of those who despise windows xp. i have been using windows98se for a pretty long time. recently i also installed w2k beside it and then, just because of my pure curiosity, upgraded my w2k to windows xp rc2.
well, okay, it seemed to be working fine, but i would call it all but user-friendly. it is colorful and probably a brilliant platform for skinning, but still.. for effective use it felt as useful as a lamp running with solar power. lots of decoration and nice little details, but i just got frustrated when, navigating around my drives, the boxes of information of no value kept popping in and out. all the effectivenes seemed to be hidden and replaced under the nice outlooks.
i know i may be getting a lot of people angry and i also know there will probably be tons of modifications (hopefully also hacks, because that's what xp needs) for it to come. however, i'll now go enjoy the usability of my w2k system. thanks for the chance to tell my opinion.
