Vista Themes

      It’s 2 am Saturday and I’m writing about what I’ve been doing for the last 3 hours.
Most people like to enjoy and relax, maybe go out on their Friday afternoons. Well no, not me. My favourite activity on a Friday afternoon is hiting the desk with my head. And I came very close to doing that today.

      There comes a time in every man’s life when he says to himself: Well I’ve got a good computer, a great OS but ( after seeing a few SCI-FI films ) I want it to really look cool. Such a thought occurred to me a few hours ago, and I decided to change my classic Vista skin with a cooler techier one. Now I’m not the one to usually have 20 skins for every application and 45 types of cursor that I change acording to my mood. Actually I haven’t really used skins for the OS ever since Win 98. It’s just something that I find useless and memory consuming. But tonight I forgot all that.

      So after googling around for a nice theme I decided ( as usual) on an OS X Leopard one, actually extremely well done from what I saw in the previews. So I downloaded a few versions to test them. Unpacked them and tried to install them. Nothing happened except for my background going black. I decided to take another look on the site where I found them. “ You need to get Vista Glazz and patch files for the skins to work”. I think to myself ok no problem, so I quickly download the latest Glazz version I can find. Install it , hit the “check dlls” button.
!!! “ Vista Glazz is missing key components of the program, do you still want to patch?”. Wow, key components ..no I don’t want to patch. I uninstall it and get the version from the original Vista Glazz website, without corrupt files and stuff ..or so I thought. Do the whole thing over again. Check dlls. “Glazz is missing key components..” oh screw it , patch anyway. It patches a few dlls from the system. Great. Reboot needed. I reboot. When I log on again , my Vista was looking somewhat like MS DOS 5 .

      I think to myself, well it went back to windows basic and now I can install the theme. SO I try to double click on the .theme file. Nothing happens. Then I try to open the personalize menu. OPS, ERROR. APP Crash, host process error. My PC was kinda telling me to go *%& myself. And I got that error for anything that had to do with visual styles , resolutions, basically the way anything looked.

      OK so I figure ..patching system dlls with obscure program = BAD IDEA. Didn’t even know what files it had patched. So I go to my theme folder and notice that the Aero files were patched. Ok no problem it must have kept originals. WRONG, no originals. So I ring a friend and he sends the original files to me via messenger. I try and replace them. BANG no can’t do. YOU NEED PERMISSION to modify these files.

      How do you change permissions in Vista? Easy, right click on the file, properties, security. Advanced, Owner, make yourself the owner of the file. Back Back back , Edit permissions, select yourself give yourself full control over the file. I had to do this for about 10 files in the end. Try and delete the patched files. Again no can’t do. The files are in use. By what? Who knows …Aero wasn’t working, no theme service was working , no graphics service was working ( I disabled all the services myself) ..but hey the files are in use. OK. Reboot. Safe Mode. Delete. WOW the files are still in use. Now that’s weird.

      Solution: Renaming the patched files ..even though they were in use I was allowed to rename them ..yeah ..don’t ask… then copying the good files, rebooting, and then deleting the patched messed up files that were no longer in use due to the name change.
So I did this for my Aero folder and the files inside it. Rebooted once more. I was actually thinking everything would be fine now. Guess again. After logging in nothing had changed, and I still got the fatal errors when trying to change stuff via control panel. And then I go to the original Glazz forum and try to search for a solution. Somebody was complaining of something similar so I followed those ideeas and found out that besides the Aero dlls it also patched a few other ones. To be exact Uxtheme.dll, Themeui.dll and Shsvcs.dll, all found in system32. And the guys also mentioned that Glazz makes a copy of the original and stores it as filename.dll.vgorg so this can be used in case anything goes wrong. Said and done. Again I modified permissions, again I rebooted in safe mode, again I changed names and deleted the crappy files and replaced them with the ones that I got my friend to send to me.( the so called copies of original with the .vgorg were of no use)

      Finally I logged in and surprise ..nothing changed. The theme was still basic BUT ..and this is important I didn’t get the Fatal error thing in Control panel. So I recopied the Aero folder once more ( it had somehow got corrupted between 3 reboots ..again don’t ask ..) recopied the good aero dlls and rebooted for the last time.

      Praise the Lord it works now. People also suggested trying to boot using “ last known good configuration” but that didn’t do any good. And also trying system restore to an earlier date but I didn’t have any restore points near today , plus I have very little faith in that program as it has NEVER helped me with anything.

      The conclusion of this story is : 1) always have a copy of the original file before doing anything to it.
 2) Try and enjoy your Friday afternoons.
 
  Please leave your comments and suggestions after the beep.

  Cheers, Geeky.

Vista Service Pack 1

      

      Yes it’s true , it’s TRUE , it’s HERE. The new Vista SP1 is here. On March the 18th Nick White from MS announced its release on Windows Update. I found out about it that night. OK, so what did Microsoft promise about the SP? They said it would improve reliability, stability, efficiency, driver compatibilities, and other such issues. What does the SP do? Well mainly what it’s supposed to.

      After about half an hour ( that’s how long the update took) and 2 restarts I had SP1 up and running. I took a look at my win version , and wow major change from build 6000 to build 6001. Good sign, means the sp worked. Second change, you can now actually select which drive you want to defragment ( no I’m serious you couldn’t on the original release of Vista). I’m messing around here but that’s because I haven’t noticed any major changes. The system does seem more stable with certain aspects, and it looks as though there’s somewhat less CPU usage, but I also noticed about 10-15 % increase in RAM usage. MS said that the service pack would bring a 50% increase in file copying speed. Of course that 50% is only possible because with the service pack they fixed some sloppy scripting they had done in the original release. Plus I did a few tests with different files and personally I would estimate the increase at about 15-20% but maybe that’s just me.

      Compatibility with different drivers was indeed improved ( I only got 1 BSOD ever since I installed the SP and that’s with a very curious driver). Unfortunately Vista is hardware scripted, meaning that it is designed for specific hardware much like Mac OS is, thus making possible many compatibility issues. Hopefully by now most manufacturers have learned to test everything with both Vista and XP ( though this should have been going on for the last 1 year and a half) and such issues can be avoided. The problem persists with older hardware that doesn’t have support any longer but that’s a different story.

      So if you have a genuine Vista install you can install the SP and have all the wonderful benefits mentioned above. But what if you don’t ? There were two main hack for vista that made it possible for everybody to enjoy it without paying. One of them was tricking the activation timer into thinking you had 999 days to activate and then just rewind it again. The second method developed by Paradox was to fool Windows by emulating a specific BIOS and then use a specific key code. This would make Windows appear as if had been preinstalled by manufacturers and required no activation. Every update worked, no issues with anything, it would easily pass registration and had no problem with WGA. Well the SP1 takes care of both these methods rendering them useless for the time being. And I did a little snooping around but until now I haven’t found any way to bypass this. So if you didn’t have a genuine install, and you installed SP1 you probably now have 15 or less days to activate.
      The good part is that there is no more “reduced functionality mode” that Vista had. After the 15 days are up you’ll just have a black background, and continuous remarks from WGA that you may be using counterfeit software. That’s all. I’m curious what would happen if you uninstalled the sp after those 15 days. The old hacks might still work. I actually will try that on another computer just for the fun of it.

For the original info on the release of SP1 you can check out this link.

For a list of some of the updates ( but not all) contained in the SP you can check out this link ( I wouldn’t download anything from there, get the original if you want Sp1, it’s free) . If you want a full list you can probably find it somewhere on the MS site.

Questions, suggestions be sure to leave a comment.

Cheers, Geeky.