WHat kind of performance hit do these 'skins' and shell replacements cost?

from WinCustomize Forums
I have an old p133 laptop with 32 megs of ram. It's running 98lite now, runs great that way. I'd like to skin it or stick on a shell replacement, but there are so many to choose from and from what I recall of my attempts several years ago, they chew up quite a bit of cpu time and ram.

Is it still the case, or is there a particular skin/shell that would not bog down the small laptop?

AvS
1,812 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
LiteStep is light, as in GeoShell. As for skinnable apps, you always have a small speed penalty to pay. It's bareable though.
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
All skinned or graphical interfaces take up resources, including the default Win98 GUI.
Replacing this default Explorer shell can reduce resource usage, and as is the nature of the beast, can increase it too....depending on how extravagant the replacement shell is configured.
If you have gone to the effort of running 98lite and deleting I Explore.exe from the system and are now running Opera or Netscape, and want to distance yourself further from the MS excesses.....there are some extremely light LiteSTEP themes around which still shell the kernel properly....and also better choices around for explorer.exe to be the file manager, eg. Powerdesk.
My first forays into Themes and skinning were on computers significantly inferior to a P133....I started themeing for LiteSTEP on a P100 with 8meg ram and a 1gig drive....and have the odd 486 around with 'STEP running happily...
Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Specifically for WindowBlinds skins - performance is highly dependant on the skin itself. UIS1+ skins are to be preferred, as they do not incur as great a performance penalty. You may find these on their own (see the UIS1+ section) or as optional sub-skins in a skin, often labelled "basic" or "light".

A trial version of WindowBlinds is available, so it's worth getting it and trying a few skins. In general, the most popular skin authors are also the best and don't make mistakes that unnecessarily impact performance, although there are always execptions.

Realistically, you're probably not going to want to run an animated skin with tens of buttons on your system, but there's no particular reason why you couldn't improve it with a lightweight but good-looking skin. Try things!