Windows 7 Ultimate

Yes, surprising as it may seem, I have finally bothered to reformat my laptop into Windows 7 Ultimate. The only real reason being I want to use my full 4GB of RAM but it was an interesting experience nonetheless.



Once I got all my commonly used programs installed or replaced, the shell is once again changed to bb4win and programs such as Samurize and typeandrun were placed into startup via their native settings.

For anyone that has seen my laptop before I have reformatted, they would easily say I did not change anything. Almost everything is the same with the exception that I am actually using Windows 7.

The Gay Meter

Messing with Samurize continued when a certain someone asked me what are the capabilities of it. After checking back with its website, I came to realize that it can potentially be used to replace my current shell, or at least, be integrated into a much less RAM intensive shell. (Litestep anyone?)



The new meter, dubbed 'The Gay Meter' by a certain someone yet again, has more function than my previous meters. This time, including volume control and indication, shortcut links to a number of commonly used programs, a text pad, and a feed that shows the latest forums topics on the right.

The primary meter is located at the bottom left of the screen, hiding the text pad and feed outside of the screen. By pressing the light purple button, the meter would either slide sideways or upwards to reveal the extra meter. The middle light purple button hides the taskbar.

The thing I like more about this meter is that it has more moving parts. Not only does it have a meter indicating the CPU usage, RAM, and disk space available, it also has three additional bars indicating seconds, minutes, and hours (in sections of 12). a meter for battery life has also been added.

Although unable to autohide, it can be right-clicked in the middle whereby it will disappear and be replaced with a 5 x 5 pixel black dot on the top left corner of the screen.

With an addition of a menu to pull up commonly used folders, this meter has successfully replaced Rocketdock though not having as much eye candy.

This meter was created with replacing the shell in mind. Therefore, an extra meter was created to load the taskbar. However, after managing to compile a very simple program to automate the meters on startup, running without the windows shell proved to have some bugs.

While I consider this meter to at least be a success, the next phase of this project is to create a new meter entirely that integrates the taskbar emulation AND the functions already in this meter. When that is done, adding lots of extra eye candy and functions is a must.

This meter currently runs at 2-3 MB of RAM on idle and can use up to 6 MB of RAM when constantly being used. The target RAM usage for the new meter is expected to be the same.

One thing I noticed with Samurize is that its autohide docking seems a little buggy. I noticed this in particular when using it on my taskbar meter. There is a workaround for this but it DOES make the meter a little more complicated.

Meter Migration

I had always used rainmeter ever since I found out of its existence. It was a rather helping tool in telling me which programs suck up resources once they start running though sucking a little resource itself.



Ladies and gentlemen, the rainmeter I used. It has a very basic interface really. I simply turned the default image it came with into gray-scale and removed some useless things while adding time and date into it. Nothing too fancy.

But then, during one fateful night, I stumbled upon samurize, which proved itself to be a little more interesting than rainmeter. So, I gave it a shot.



It was not bad at all. Though this time, I didn't simply modify the default skin. Instead, I made my own from scratch. The skin editor was surprising simple and had a nice GUI unlike rainmeter which was limited to only editing everything on notepad.

I made it based a lot on rainmeter, taking out what I find irrelevant and placing some extras that I have been unable to do on rainmeter.

While I liked it much better, some things of it bother me. For one, I can't seem to make it fade-out. Hence, I made it transparent and binded some hot-keys to hide it completely when necessary. Seeing to as I would most likely continue to work on it, I also binded another hot-key to refresh it instantly.

Despite the minor inconveniences, I do prefer it over rainmeter for several reasons:
- It has a very friendly user interface for skin making
- It is definitely less complicated when stretching the limits of what it can do (plug-ins and whatnot.)
- It uses less RAM than rainmeter (in comparison with my configurations.)
- Did I mention skin making from scratch is surprisingly simple?

Do give both programs a try if you find it interesting and do tell me about it.

Links:
Rainmeter
Samurize