The VideoLAN Forums

Here's a thread put together simply for helping to make your PC the fastest, fiercest thing around. I'll give a couple of suggests for some great programs, registry tweaks and websites for improving your computer's overall visual appeal.

All can join in. Give suggestions on what you think will improve one's computer in any way.

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Disclaimer: why do I even need one of these?
Well anyway you make your own decisions.
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I'll do one at a time for now.

Performance Tweak.

I found this great program on the web awhile back and it did a dozy on my hard drive performance drastically increasing it's speed from what it once was. Maybe you'll want to try it out.

SpeedItUp Free (freeware)



Post your tweaks and ideas below and let's keep this going.

Alright here's a little thing that I picked up that should dramatically increase your computer's startup time. It's somewhat for advanced users but really if you just follow me closely you shouldn't have any trouble.

Startup Tweak.

This is for Windows XP users only.

(1). So here's what we'll do first: click on the Start button then click on the "Run" command. When the window appears type: "regedit", the Registry Editor should now appear. Now this is where you need to follow me closely, select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet -> Control -> Session Manager -> Memory Management -> PrefetchParameters, in the right-pane window double-click on EnablePrefetcher, set the value data from 3 (default) to 2. This will make it so that Windows will only prefetch data concerning the Windows startup.

(2) Select My Computer and go to C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch. You can delete everything in that folder, it only collects a small amount of data on how some programs start but from my experience deleting has made little to no difference in startup time. This will not stop programs from loading. If you're still a little concerned about this you could always Cut & Paste everything to a different folder so that you can restore it later if want.

(3). Download Bootvis, install it to your computer, Start the program, click on "Trace" in the menu bar and select Optimize System. After 10 second it'll restart your computer. You may notice that it'll go through the boot screen quite a bit faster but then it'll take a bit longer at the Welcome screen, this is normal. Once in Windows it'll automatically start to optimize the startup configuration then when it's finished it'll close and you're done.

If you check back on the Prefetch folder under WINDOWS you'll see that there are only 2 files, the Layout and the PF File. You can restart your computer again to see the final results.

Tell me if this worked or didn't work.

This is a good site for all sorts of tips & tweaks....& hardware too.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1 ... 545,00.asp

BTW just out of interest VLC is most popular download at present at filehippo.com

http://www.filehippo.com/

Visual.

I'm sure many of you must already know about this site but for those of you that don't here's where you can get tons of Windows Blinds skins, Wallpapers, Icons, ect mostly for FREE:

WinCustomize

I'll come back with more later. Post your own if you'd like.

Visual

Here's yet another great site for checking out a whole catalog of skins for Windows Blinds and a ton of other applications as well:

deviantART

Use the "Categories" tab to check out some of the other stuff.

Before I leave here's a nice Windows Blind skin that I found whick also happens to have a VLC skin which is not present on the VLC skins page:

Niqu 1.0 For Windows (Updated) by ~kavin.

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Performance Tweak
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This is very simple actually. If you have 512 mega bytes or more of memory and you don't run too many memory intensive programs (you can see how much memory is being used by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Esc -> (tab) Performance and it's under "PF Usage") then try this:

Run using only onboard memory.
Not everyone may realize it but by default your computer uses part of your hard drive space as if it were memory, the is called "paging". The problem is that your hard drive isn't as fast as your onboard memory. You'll probably have a nice all around performance gain if you turn off the paging file completely and let your computer run solely on system memory.

To do this click on "Start", right-click on "My Computer" and go to Properties. Select the "Advanced" tab and click on "Settings" under Performance. Click on "Advanced" and "Change" under Virtual memory. For each drive select "No paging file", click the "Set" button and clcik "OK" to all. It will probably ask you to restart your computer, say OK ans all is done.

Your computer should be running a lot faster now. If you have some trouble with programs crashing because there isn't enough onboard memory them just go back that paging file and select any one of the drives, choose "Custom size" and set it to a higher value (make sure to press the "Set" button).

I hope this wasn't too much info to follow.

Alternative to using WindowBlinds
For me WindowBlinds did often apply the chosen skin improperly after restart and it also does eat quite some resources. Additionally WindowBlinds is no freeware...
The free alternative is just patching your uxtheme.dll so that you can apply skins that do not origin from microsoft. You can find the patch here: http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS- ... cher.shtml

Then you could look for visual style for example at http://browse.deviantart.com/customizat ... lltime=yes

To install a theme download the zip files and extract the .msstyle-File and the shell subfolders to C:/Windows/Resources/Themes/NAME OF MSSTYLE FILE WITHOUT EXTENSION/

Thereafter rightclick onto your desktop, go to the appearance tab and choose your new style from the dropdown.

Note: This is Windows XP only

Styling your Windows Explorer Toolbar
1) Using Y'zToolbar
Download Y'zToolbar 1.03 from http://www.stevofc.com/down/yztbr103.zip
Unpack it somewhere and put a link to yztoolbar.exe into your autostart folder. Preferrably create a registry entry under HKCU/Software/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run with the path to yztoolbar.exe

Download skins for it for example at http://www.guimods.com/index.php?tag=yz-toolbars
Unpack the skins to the themes subfolder in your yztoolbar installation directory.

To apply the skin rightclick the toolbar in windows explorer choose yztoolbar options and select the skin.

Note: This is for Windows XP only

2) Using Styler's Toolbar
Note: Styler's Toolbar might not work...

Download Styler's from http://www.crystalxp.net/galerie/en.id.551.htm

Run Styler's and check "Toolbar Mode", because the other options are unnecessary for toolbar changing.

Download Skins from http://browse.deviantart.com/customizat ... tylertool/ and unpack them to the toolbars dir of the stylers installation.

Good tips. I'm tiered of Windows Blinds too and of course it’s always good to have a free alternative. I use somewhat strange alternatives for obtaining high quality icon from Icon Packager without actually having to use Icon Packager but I’ll post that later, nothing illegal, I think.

Have a dock like Mac OS X has
My favorite dock software is the free RocketDock (http://rocketdock.com/).
You can minimize windows into the dock and use docklets from ObjectDock (You can find such for example at http://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx? ... t=Docklets ) Note that ObjectDock is no free software, only the docklets for it are free.
Skins for RocketDock can be found on rocketdock.com and on many other places spread over the internet, just google.

Cool Icons you can find once again at DeviantArt.com

A really cool look and feel for Windows and many other tools
is the Tango! Desktop Project.

There exists an easy tool to convert your whole windows icons to tango style at http://vertigosity.deviantart.com/art/T ... 1-27940418
There do also exist visual styles for windows xp, for example http://joachimcharles.deviantart.com/ar ... C-64232161 or http://mandomkorea.deviantart.com/art/T ... t-61628187 (These need a patched uxtheme.dll)
At DeviantArt.com you can find also tango! skins for many other applications like Miranda.


Screenshot at: http://d-gfx.kognetwork.ch/desktop070926.jpg

Hey aLtgLasS could you explain in a little more detain how to install the uxTheme patch? I've tried following the instructions carefully but nothing seems to work, it always shows up as "Windows classic style" instead of the new visual style, some further guidance would be useful.

After you've installed the patch and rebooted Windows should now accept also non-M$ themes.

Let's say you would like to use the Foton VS from http://omart.deviantart.com/art/Foton-VS-15733908

Inside the zip you find under MsStyle/Foton the file "Foton.msstyles" and a folder called "Shell". These two have to be unpacked to %WINDIR%/Resources/Themes/Foton.
So you'll have %WINDIR%/Resources/Themes/Foton/Foton.msstyles and %WINDIR%/Resources/Themes/Foton/Shell/*

Then go to Display Properties>Appearance and choose "Foton" from the first dropdown et voilá.

This is how it should work. Always make sure that the folder containing the msstyle has the same name as the msstyle file, otherwise Windows won't find it.

Also note that some themes do not have a custom shell style, so no "Shell" folder exists with them.

Hope that helps

I'll try it out. This is the skin I'm trying to get:

Edit: (Download link) Aero Diamond

I had trouble at first installing this theme
http://lassekongo83.deviantart.com/art/ ... 3-64653342
but i used this from softpedia & it became easy to follow
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS- ... cher.shtml
& as aLt. said i just placed it in WINDOWS>Resources>Themes & it worked a treat.

@Cloudstalker:
Aero Diamond is only for vista, but the uxtheme patch I posted is only working with xp and 2003. I don't know which tool is to be used for Vista.

BTW: Another great tool to make XP look like Vista. It makes your XP look like it has Aero: transparent window frame with blur effect, glowing buttons and other effects. http://www.vystal.de.vu/