[crazy4laptops]

I'm now an xp pro sp3 user.
I had been playing around with some vista visual styles/themes and found one that works perfectly and makes a xp desktop look pretty similar to vista.
It was a theme in the vista magic pack that worked. Now after upgrading to sp3, i can no longer apply vista visual styles.
When i double click on the theme that i want, the display properties comes up under the appearance tab and there isn't an option to change my theme to vista, it only shows my current one (royale/media center)
How can i fix it?

[lilxkid24]

uxtheme patcher doesn't work on SP3 so if your using that to patch a theme its not going to work.

[crazy4laptops]

what else is there to try?

[rgreen4]

Vista?

[crazy4laptops]

i've actually tried that, but no, it doesn't work.

[rgreen4]

In a more serious mode, it has been documented that in the development of the kernel for NT6 (Vista), MS closed off a lot of the loopholes that allowed programers to get directly to the video without going through the kernel. These had basically been there since DOS 1.0 in various forms to speed up the write to the screen, but also provided an avenue for attack. MS had warned through their Programmer Development Kit that they were going to close them and I think had actually planned to do it in Win2000 (NT5), but backed off. It became a real problem in XP, so they slammed the door in Vista.

It is entirely possible that they closed some of the doors in SP3. We should know as gamers upgrade to SP3, if the games noted for taking the short cut to gain that last millisecond in speed start screaming bloody murder that their games won't run. Of course your issue may be related to another area. There was an article that commented on some of the security improvments that would be made in SP3, but I don't recall it.

I take it from you comment that either Vista will not run on your laptop, or it would be a cold day in the warm room down below before you would install Vista.

I can offer you only sympathy and maybe the fact that you might want to consider whether the gains of SP3 are worth losing your theme. Other than consolidating the patches and a few other tweaks, there was not reported to be a major improvements, not at all like SP2.

[crazy4laptops]

from your previous post,

I don't really understand what you mean by this-
> I take it from you comment that either Vista will not run on your laptop, or it would be a cold day in the warm room down below before you would install Vista.
[/quote]


I refuse to use vista. It's a contradiction to everything M$ has said about it. Plus, I don't like an o/s that needs 15 gigs for installation



But in my post, i was talking about trying to appy the vista theme straight to xp. Basically copying the vista theme files from the resources folder, and then moving them into the xp theme folder and trying to appy it. That doesn't work, it needed some dlls to function. I'll experiment with it some other time.

[rgreen4]

crazy4laptops said:

i've actually tried that, but no, it doesn't work.

I took that statement to mean that you had tried Vista and it did not work. Or that you were taking the postition that it would be a cold day in Hades before you would install it. Apparently from your reply, it's the latter. You had asked what to do since XP SP3 has apparently hosed the Vista theme you had installed on XP. I jokingly replied Vista.


XP takes about 8GB after installation with software, Vista takes maybe 15. Since 40GB was considered a large HD when XP was introduced and 500GB is the norm today, it actually takes a lower percentage of your HD.

They have both come a long way since an OS fit on a single 320K disc (DOS 1.0 was 320K, DOS 1.1 was360K).

[coastie65]

Hey rg, Apparantly with SP3, Micro$oft has slammed the door on those who don't like the OS but do like the Vista wallpapers. Spoilsports. coastie

[piyushsingh]

rgreen's post explains everything very nicely. Just to add, a clean vista install takes about 6 gigs and not 15 gigs.

[rgreen4]

Well by the time I installed Vista, Office 2007 Home & Student, Quicken2006, Adobe Reader 8, Avast, SuperAntiSpyware, Acronis, Foxfire, Opera, Ulead, PhotoImpact it all took about 13GB. My C: drive now has 23GB out of 160GB occupied.

[piyushsingh]

6 gigs is for a clean install , just the OS without any other thing. 15 gigs is another common misconception among vista haters.
Although if you install Sp1 separate , it needs 5 gigs extra during install but that is recovered later. :)