Now that he's gone, it was mentioned that Nim didn't have acess to the services "But I forgot to take the feat that allows me to manipulate "services" last time I levelled (August 15th). How would I go about stopping the theme service? It sounds to good to be true. Is it something in the registry?" All the control panel applet does is edit the registry, or use the "Net Start / Stop" command In XP it's often better to use the System restore to create a restore point, which will backup the registry. Also, if the PC fails to start, the good old NT "last know good" option when starting up allows you to use the backup of the registry the system makes everytime it starts up, allowing you to roll the registry back a session.
-------------------- Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil...prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon...
Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
Of course that's all the MMC does, but it's still easier (not to mention *safer* for someone who doesn't spend every waking moment in his system's registry) than manually messing with key values is. Besides, now he does know how to access them again, whereas telling him to grub around in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\blabla is the sort of thing you usually only do to get rid of your $RELATIVE-in-law.
Begone, foul creature.
-------------------- ".mirrorS arE morE fuN thaN televisioN" - TEH PNIK FLAMIGNO
Registered: Nov 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
Oh my. Well fortune favors the me because now that someone mentioned restore points, I remember I promised myself I'd make one of those after I got my computer up and running again (August 15th).
I did switch off Themes in the Service and Applications knob, and set it to Manual for good measure.
Registered: Aug 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
(sharpens poking stick) He said he couldn't access the GUI and wanted to know where in the registry it was!
Anyway, hacking the registry is like changing a car tyre, or wiring a plug, a task a responsible adult should be able to do without having to get someone to do it for them! See, he's ok now, after taking you advice and ignoring mine! So there!
-------------------- Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil...prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon...
Come now Beverlies, I've used info from all sides and gotten more informed in the process and FYI I've dabbled in the registry many times before (for such diverse elements as menu opening speeds and screwing with Windows Prefetcher, huzzah).
Cartman: Relative-in-law? Was that spoiler material? I never thought I'd get to use the joke about someone being PC in a PC-discussion.
Registered: Aug 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
Sorry to walk in late and only read some of the posts because I'm lazy, but if you get Windows to start in Safe mode (by F5 or F8 or whatever it is nowadays), then an Admin account should appear in addition to your normal (and only account).
Try changing the theme to the silver one and then seeing if it reverts back to blue or not after a while. I'm not sure if it'll fix anything, but hey, I quite like the silver theme.
(If you're desperate, you could always just get LiteStep and skin the thing.)
Oh, and don't listen to Jason, as he can't use Google. Typing in "Windows XP problem" into google.com gives us 33,400,000 results. Whereas Apple fans get to prove how superiour their system is by pointing out that "MAC OS X problem" produces a measly... 31,400,000 results. Woot.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
Thanks, Liam. I think I managed to kill it by switching off "Themes" as a service yesterday, it hasn't acted up on me yet.
I do like the XP-silver theme over the fingerpaint one and had it for a year, but as I have W2K at work I thought I'd try "Classic" at home too as I was reinstalling XP (August 15th, yay) and a superstitious part of me has since then believed that I save a teensy amount of RAM and cpu powar by not having a theme going. I also shut off menu-fading and shadows as well, even though I have a 3GHz processor and I could have dancing figs on my desktop for all it cared.
The last six months have seen me cutting back greatly on system tools abuse as well, although I still get the newsletter from defraggers anonymous. I remember when I was young you had to care for your drive and defrag it once a month and do a scandisk too if the system felt ditzy. Nowadays the system seems to take care of itself mostly, better file dispersion management or whatyoucallit. *sigh*
Registered: Aug 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
You should still defrag etc frequently, it still make a difference even with 7200 disks. I'm thinking of setting my pc to start in the middle of the night, defrag, virus scan, spyware scan, update, backup and shut itself down again.
-------------------- Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil...prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon...
quote:Originally posted by PsyLiam: Typing in "Windows XP problem" into google.com gives us 33,400,000 results. Whereas Apple fans get to prove how superiour their system is by pointing out that "MAC OS X problem" produces a measly... 31,400,000 results. Woot.
Unless there's been an additional 3,700,000 problems found in XP since your post (not unlikely) then your search must be mistaken, I entered it and got 37,100,000 for 'Windows XP problem', and a still respectable 31,600,000 for 'MAC OS X problem'. Meaning OS X is only approximately 85% as crappy and bug-ridden as XP.
Not much to brag about really is it Mr. Jobs, hmm?
-------------------- Garbled, confusing and quite frankly duller than an inflight magazine produced by Air Belgium.
Registered: May 2004
| IP: Logged
posted
You are so wrong. Never mind the fact that you are making the exact same point I am, you are brimming over with wrongability.
(I'm also on a different machine to my earlier test and got the same result.)
(Wrong.)
Anyway Nim, you are right in that you could save a teensy bit of power by turning off themes. You could also reduce your desktop to 16 colours and have no wallpaper. But doing so will be silly. Turning off the Theme service has problem saved you 0.000001% of your overall power.
Are you an obsessive overclocker, too?
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
Sorry for derailing the thread temporarily but I am so not wrong. But since the original problem of the thread seems to have been resolved I think this petty desire on my part to show that I can in fact count isn't going to cause the end of the world.
-------------------- Garbled, confusing and quite frankly duller than an inflight magazine produced by Air Belgium.
Registered: May 2004
| IP: Logged
Printer-friendly view of this topic
