Aston. New Experience.

Aston is a shell. It doesn't compete with WindowBlinds.

Also, no one claims that WindowBlinds uses no memory. So please don't write misleading things about it.

Aston is a nice shell. But that's what it is. A shell.

Well, Draginol, you're true here. These programs have quite a different target groups. WB is first of all a decoration tool while Aston is often used because of its small resource usage and stability. Probaly upcoming A2 would compete with DesktopX, but not with WB (as far as I know Gladiators are not going to reproduce Stardock's deed of making a window decoration tool for Windows). At present time Aston is mainly competing with the Talisman 2 (which has some nice features, but which is less stable) and Hoverdesk (has some excellent themes, but now seems to abandoned).
As for WB resource usage... You often mention, that its memory footprint is very small (2Mb IIRC) and CPU usage is nearly zero. Let me disagree with that. I tried numerous versions of WB since 1998. None of them worked flawlessly and they all vere consuming too much resources of my machines (both old Celeron 333 Mhz/192Mb and new Athlon 1800/512Mb) to let me work with other software. Unfortunately many other people (friends of mine) had the same experience.
Aston is a shell. No one says the opposite But it may also serve the purpose of Desktop decoration and in this field Aston and WB slightly interfer (WB skins shell elements, right?) People like nice looking skins and themes, you know

Aston is primarily used, like WindowBlinds, for decoration. Let's be honest about that. Sure, Litestep, Talsiman, Hoverdesk, and the other shells can use fewer resources than Explorer but that's not the main reason people are using them in 2004. It's the customization features.

The amount of memory wbload.exe uses is not a matter of opinion. It's a stated fact. Also, if you're going to throw past WB performance then let's do the same with Aston which was very buggy and unstable when it first came on the scene. TODAY, WindowBlinds is very fast and uses very little memory. Do you want to claim publicly now that Aston 1.0 was problem free? Heck, you couldn't even use Aston with Windows XP until 1.4. And when I tried it I ran into problems with some of my apps (mainly Corel Photopaint and Corel Draw) which both got fixed in a later version.

You came on here and claimed that WindowBlinds advocates "lie" and claim it uses no resources. I take offense at that because we never make that claim. Its COMPETITORS of WindowBlinds such as TGT Soft that make claims like that.

More to the point - WindowBlinds and Aston don't overlap at all. They're analogous to Word and Excel. They don't compete which is why I couldn't understand the reason you'd bring up WindowBlinds.

WindowBlinds would work WITH Aston, not instead of it.

I think Aston is the leading alternative shell presently. My only beef with it is that the developers of it are bandwidth bandits (they silently link the themes on skin sites without giving credit rather than hosting the themes themselves, that's why WinCustomize won't support Aston, if we're going to have a library for it we expect users to visit WC to get them, not go to astonshell.com and just leech the file from our site undre the covers).

Interesting article. Aston looks cool, though I am really happy with the way Windowblinds+Desktop X+Object Dock Plus make my desktop look and work. Very, very cool.

Anyway, I just have to chime in on the idea of Windowblinds hogging resources. Let me state the facts as they are on my computer. The process wbload.exe is using 0% of CPU (and only uses CPU power when in that instant I change themes), 640 K of memory and 39 handles. Looks pretty resource lite to me. There are only a couple processes using less resources, and I don't even know what they do.

Draginol, let me argue a bit. Believe or not, but the number of people, using Aston because of its small resource usage is larger, than you think Yes, you're right, customization features are important (but don't mix adding usability features and adding eye-candy features).

I'm not goint to blame WB for its bugs in the past, rather than I won't argue with the fact, that Aston had troubles with Windows XP until the 1.7 release. I'm talking for myself and my personal experience. Some time ago, when writing an article about Windows customization in one Russian computer magazine I tested numerous skinnable and skinning tools (had to confess, that most of them were done by Stardock). And during these tests it turned out, that while running WB on MY machine I was unable to perform some tasks with acceptable speed. I may believe, that on certain computer configuration WB is nearly "transparent" (its resource usage is negligible), but in some resons the versions I tested on computers I tested (not only my personal PC) were actually slowing down the system. That's mot a flame. That's MY PERSONAL experience through the years. i might be the unlucky one...

BTW, we're not going to judge graphic application's resource usage, relying on Windows Taskman, right? It actually shows almost nothing useful.

As for competing... The only place where they cross (as i already mentioned) is shell skinning.

But your article above talks about WindowBlinds in the present tense.  How isit relevant what your experience with WindowBlinds was years ago?

That's like the linux guy who insists that Windows crashes every 5 minutes because the last version they tried was Windows 95?

There is a fundamental difference in performance and reliability of any desktop enhancement when running on Windows 9x vs. Win2K/XP.

WindowBlinds ALWAYS ran very well on the NT based OSes because those OSes don't have GDI resource limitations whereas Win9x ones did.  It wasn't some bug in WindowBlinds. it was that most peple were already running their Win9x systems close to the edge and WindowBlinds would push them over.

Windows XP came out 3 years ago.  And Windows 2000 came out a year and a half before that.  WindowBlinds always worked well on those OSes. 

You made untrue statements about WindowBlinds:

Install a Desktop decoration tool, like Windows Blinds. What you get: the look of your Desktop can be changed by applying skins, but still this approach is not too much flexible. You can change the look of your Desktop, but its functionality remains unchainged. You may like this or not, but you can do nothing with it. Besides, Desktop decoration tools usually consume a considerable amount of additional system resources. Don't believe anyone saying, that Windows Blinds or MSStyles has no memory footprint or consumes no CPU power. This is just a blatant lie (and developers know about that).

First, WindowBinds can add new functionality.  It can add new title bar buttons. You can put plugins.  Heck, pretty much anything you could do with Aston could be done with WindowBlinds except that functionalty has to be tied into the existing GUI.  You could have an RSS feed or weather checker or whatever.

But what really annoyed me was the implication that WindowBlinds is purely decorative which is not true.  I use WindowBlinds for productivity as well.  I have it so that when I right click on the title bar the app will minimize.  My skins tend to have roll-up buttons on them as well as a push-pin button to keep them always on top.  That's new functionality that isn't part of the OS.

You then go on to make the false claim that WindowBlinds users/developers say it uses "no memory foot print".  Sorry but don't lump WindowBlinds developers/users in with msstyles advocates. We've never made such a claim.

You were basically trying to build up Aston by tearing down WindowBlinds.  At least, that's how it came across to me.

I just don't get it. Windowblinds has what to do with Aston? Anyone could use both at the same time without any problems, Aston to change shell and look of OS, but windows would still look like native Windows. I could then use Windowblinds to change the look of windows itself to match the shell.

In other words, You just said that your car's wheels is better than Brad's steering wheel, car gas display, speed indicator, etc area. Simply different aspects of car.

I have used Windowblinds for over a year now, and I have had no problems with it at all. I remember when it was less stable years ago, which was the reason I stopped using Windowblinds years ago. Now? I doubt I will ever stop using Windowblinds again.

BTW, we're not going to judge graphic application's resource usage, relying on Windows Taskman, right? It actually shows almost nothing useful.

Then educate me please. I understand that it certainly doesn't tell me all that it is doing, but surely knowing how much memory and CPU usage a program is accessing is at least a little important, right?

BTW, I do want to say that overall, tihs is a really good article.  I wish more people would write articles on other shells and software.

All the garbage about memory usage comes from us greyhairs that started griping in the mid-90's. When Windowblinds used 10 megs of your ram in 1999, and you only had 32 or 64 megs, then yeah, that wasn't woth the aesthetics. Now, I have a gig of ram in my machine, and my I have games that eat 300 megs of it with ease. Apps like Windowblinds aren't even an issue any more.

I used Aston a long while back, and I didn't like it. I'm sure it has changed a lot since then, though. Talisman is my shell of choice, but of late I have been leaning toward DesktopX running alongside explorer.

Draginol, I didn't want to offend you, but as you can clearly see I DON'T like WB and have my resons to do that, already described. When saying, that WB is buggy (in my experience much more byggy, than MSStyles) and consumes too much system resources I talk about recent releases I tried (I should confess the older versions vere even worse). And yes, I'm running Windows XP and know, how many features it gives to GUI developers. I may change my opinion (and, maybe, even write a new article about that) if you give me a version of WB, that works flawlessly on MY PC. 'till now I saw none...
As for usability... As the article is mainly referred to shells, additional features to windows doesn't matter much. Still its my fault: WB can still help a little here
For myself I personally prefer MSStyles (I'm not talking about a known pruduct of a known company, which uses them) over WindowBlinds (actually use none of them) because the first caused a way less problems on MY computer configuration.

BlueDev, Taskman can indicate almost anything. It's also possible for developers to make it show zero memory or CPU usage while running a program (luk, zat program uzez no RAM, they r 3l334). That mostly refers to applications, which use a lot of graphics. Depending on a kind of bitmap allocation RAM usage values can jump in huge leaps. Example: if you use BMP/JPG pictures in Aston (no matter how large and numerous they are) Taskman RAM indicator doesn't move, but as only you load it with PNGs, indicated RAM usage jumps ahead. Another sample with the same Aston: Taskman indicates 20Mb RAM usage (zey suxxx), from which nearly 19Mb belong to an attached Explorer process (soneome was lazy to set a single checkbox). These were just 2 samples...

A) Buggy: what bugs? What happened? DId you look into customer support? When I have run it I have had no issues at all. Considering the thousands upon thousands of people that use WB every day with no problems, I find it difficult to believe that you couldn't straighen it out. Talk to customer support folks, they'll tell ya when people gripe, it is never THEIR problem, then after they find out it was their fault all along they never apologize or go back onlne and retract all the idiotic rants they've posted all over the internet...

System Resources. Now that is an easy one to address. How much did it use? You can say "too much", but I have gotten into discussions with people that swore Winamp was a resource hog, only to find out it was using less than 10 megs on their system at the time.

Maybe you shoudl be more specific if you want to responsibly complain. This is just the same, tired arguement I have heard about apps like this since 1998, and it always ends the same way. The person obstanantly insists the program has too many problems for them to enjoy using, and thousands of people keep right on using it with no problems.

I'm glad you're happy with WB, BakerStreet.
In case you need some samples, OK, I'll give them:
A) System crashes. Somehow WB managed to crash the whole system (I'm using Windows XP, so this is not a trivial task) when applying a certain skin (checked trice: you press a button on the skin and then must reboot your PC). Had absolutely no such problems with MSStyles, eFX, etc... Window skinning bugs: on certain windows headers and window elements thend to climb or shift, causing a very unpleasant feeling of garbage. The same applies to MSstyles, though I have much less problems with it. I don't write any bugreports because I don't like this application and don't use it (thousands of happy customers better do it instead). And such a behaviors was seen by me on numerous machines and numerous OS and program's versions, INCLUDING (underline!) recent builds. I don't care if it works good for someone as it doesn't work good for me and numerous friends of mine (many of them are tech. specialists).
If you find an objective good way to measure such an application's resource usage (read above), then I'll tell you exactly. From MY EXPERIENCE even simple work in Explorer (switching between many windows, moving windows, etc...) was VISUALLY a way slower, than before. The same refers to heavy tasks (rendering, working with larde bitmaps, encoding files, etc...), which were nearly impossible to operate while running WB. That's what I call slow. And if such things happen i don't care what Taskman shows me.
IMHO bugless window border skinning in Windows is a kind of utopia. In order to make it work flawlessly MS has to rewrite the whole Windows engine and in its current state both MSstyles and WB are just hacks (the same can be told about many other aspects of Windows customization).

Aston looks a ecxellent and powerfull desktop tool. One thing i would like in Aston is a possibility to work together with Windows Explorer. And about Windowblinds, I LOVE IT and i started to use it from version 2.12 and i never had any problem it's uuse only 1.800 k of memory here, but i can live with this cause Windowblinds bring a lot of ECXELLENT featurings like animations, sounds, extra buttons like minimize to tray, transparence, players controls, custon menus and more.

danilloOc: Talisman and DesktopX are good choices if you want to run your desktop enhancement over explorer.

sacrat: You aren't interested in fixing your problems, nor can you even tell us how you come to the conclusion that WB uses excessive resources. It could be theme related, it could be an application conflict, who knows? Not you, anyway, so you can't really make the those claims responsibly. You prefer just to blame the app and go on. No offense, but I'm not buying the "numerous friends of mine" stuff.

It would be easier to believe it it wasn't for the fact I have seen that argument almost word-for-word for the last 5+ years, and oddly no one can ever "put up or shut up". Granted, flaming WB seems to be the L33T thing to do in some circles. Whatever makes you feel cool...

"I don't write any bugreports because I don't like this application and don't use it"

'nuff said.

danilloOc, it's possible to run Aston and explorer: just don't deattach Explorer process in Shell Swapper. Surely, there would still be a single shell: Aston.

BakerStreet: forgive me, buddy, but you seem to have troubles with reading. I'm not going to write the same over and over again. I don't know, what was the reason of such troubles, but as they ramained on at least three absolutely different computer configurations, WB and Windows versions I'm not going to look for the lreason. I. DON'T. NEED. IT. The same is with some other apps: Litestep or Geoshell may work OK if you dance near them with a tambourine. I want a program work flawlessly just after installation. If this never happens, I stop using it. Simple? I don't want to look for the bugs in a program I don't use. That's normal.
When using programs I prefer stability and productivity over beauty. That's why I give up using software...
And again: show me the version of WB, that works flawlessly on MY PC and I might change my opinion. Until then your arguments are no way better, than mine.

I might soon try to write an article, comparing WB, patched MSStyles (TGT Soft products) and other border skinning engines with the latest versions of available software, so there are still chances that I might accept WB.

"I don't want to look for the bugs in a program I don't use. That's normal."

If you aren't interested in WB, then you have no reason to critique it. If you don't take the time to find out if your "bugs" are really bugs or not, then you have no RIGHT to critique it. You can try to sound all l33t and say:

"When using programs I prefer stability and productivity over beauty. That's why I give up using software..."

but the fact is you haven't tried to find out what was wrong, so you have no idea if it is stable or not. I really don't have much hope for any such article you'd write, honestly, since you can't even get WB running well. Stop blaming the machine.

Don't fall back on the "I don't need the app, so I don't use it" crap and then try to blame bugs. You don't need it, so you don't take the time to find out what the REAL problem is.

The WB themes itself can be buggy, believe me.

It doesn't mean that WB itself is buggy.

Bunch of friends? Everyone I know that uses WB ( as in "real world" ), which totals to about 4 people, never had problems with WB at all.

My main beef is that the statement here is a cheap jab at Windowblinds, anyway. You can't compare it to a shell, it is a totally different app. The mention of Windowblinds was needless and shows the author's ignorance, I think.

sacrat-Thanks for the info.

Sacrat: You really damage your credibility when you just go after WindowBlinds. It's so gratuitious.  WindowBlinds crashing your whole computer? Sheehs, you must have serious problems.  You mentioned earlier you hadn't even tried WindowBlinds in a long time. 

Did you know WindowBlinds is Microsoft certified? Do you know what it requires to get MS certified? It's not just filling out some form. It has to go through a battery of testing and compatibility analysis by an independent organization.  There are also countless reviews of WindowBlinds 4 available on thet net including PC Magazine which gave it 4 stars and said "It does NOT slow down your computer".  There are benchmarks on the net from various websites including UGO's game site which states that WindowBinds not only doesn't slow down your machine but it's noticeably faster for games than using msstyles.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion. That isn't what this is about.  But an opinion is only as valuable as the data behind it.  When you trash WindowBlinds, you ultimately make your views on Aston less valuable too because people won't take what you say on other subjects seriously.

Let's see, companies who use third party made .msstyles: NONE.

Companies who license WindowBlinds to provide third party visual styles:

Microsoft, nVidia, ATI, Nintendo, Good Year, and dozens of others.

Do you think those companies would license WindowBlinds if it was buggy or slow?  Heck, EVERY Alienware PC this Fall will come with WindowBlinds preinstalled.

From my personal experience I have found that many, many "buggy" programs are really the result of poor computer maintenance. I am by no means saying there are not bad and terribly bug riddled programs out there. But when I hear few people ranting about the "instabilities" of a program while there are many of us using it without a single hitch I can't help but think perhaps the problem lies in the user and not the program.

I don't know a ton about computers, but know enough to keep my system running really smooth. And to be honest the only problem I have ever had with Windowblinds was a few graphical glitches here and there before I updated from the Catalyst 4.4. I cannot recall it ever having crashed my computer and it runs incredibly smooth. Oh, and folks simply stare, wide eyed, when they see my computer. Always gets the comments.

Sometimes you just have to take responsibility for making a program work well on your own system. I know I have.

XX: I know. I had repeatable system crashes with a single theme. Others worked better. Still, if an application crashes because of a theme, it's the guilt of the app developer as well.

BakerStreet: don't say anything you know nothing about

Draginol:
First. What do you mean under a "long time"? In my opinion a week of extensive usage and tests for 16 hours a day is more, than enough.

Second. As a person, personally involed in numerous experiments by definition (I managed to graduate as a quantum electronics physicist) I don't believe anyone just saying, that something works good. It might be Microsoft certified. Good to you if it helps promoting WB. And no matter to me if I still see bugs. "It does NOT slow down your computer". Huh. These articles have nothing said about the testing metodics/computer/OS/configurations. Again: it might work for someone, but as i managed not to get into this "someone" group, I stay with my opinion.

Third. Again. I give you an offer, which can gudge us. Give me a copy of Windows Blinds you consider bugless/fast/etc and I'll conduct several tests on PCs I have access to. After that I'll post the resulting data: OS/PC configuration (which might be from quite good to outdated), testing metodics, user opinions and whatever else you consider useful. If in these tests I'll notice no bugs and glitches I'll write this in my blog and even apologize to you (as you felt offented by my possibly-out-of-the-date-claims). So overall there would be results of a reproducible tests, which are more useful for both sides, than endless arguments for and against.

... I'm thinking I know a *little* bit about skinning... MAYBE even a bit more than you. ... ya think?