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Stardock Curtains
Does anyone here use Stardock Curtains? What do you think of it?
I just installed the free 30-day trial. It seems nice enough, but I don't think it's worth $9.99, and I don't expect to keep it. I can do almost everything it does manually, at no charge. -- Ken |
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#2
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Stardock Curtains
Ken Blake wrote:
Does anyone here use Stardock Curtains? What do you think of it? I just installed the free 30-day trial. It seems nice enough, but I don't think it's worth $9.99, and I don't expect to keep it. I can do almost everything it does manually, at no charge. To me, it's fluff, like bedazzling a pair of jeans. Doesn't make the jeans last any longer or add more pockets. But then lots of users like to pretty up their Windows desktop with wallpaper or even slide shows making it busy and making recognition harder (but their desktop is a mess, anyway). I like solid color or white painted walls, and never lay wallpaper over my home's walls. Before Microsoft added the dark theme, I had already switched to a solid black wallpaper (and on my smartphone, too), and some programs already have skins you can choose, so I picked a dark one, before Microsoft provided a dark Windows theme. I don't like flashlights shining into my eyes, even during the day. White on black has more contrast with less light output than black on white (which was used for books because it was cheaper to use bleached paper than dyed black paper). There are times when I'm trying to read a book outside and find the glare from the sun bouncing off the book's pages to be a nuisance. Same for a mostly white screens glaring bright light into my eyes. In bright daylight, I can see white on black text without having to up the brightness level to get black on white to be visible. The only products I ever considered from Stardock was their Fences (freeware) to organize the desktop icons along with restoring their positioning after a screen resolution change (often caused by games, especially since they crash a lot leaving the wrong screen resolution for the desktop) and Start10 ($5) to get a Windows 7-like Start menu. Eventually the games got better (didn't crash as much, but they still do because adding graceful error recovery adds code and hits performance, and they often use libs they didn't build and are poorly documented). DesktopOK (freeware) works well enough to restore the position of the desktop icons along with restoring the original screen resolution (but not automatically, so a couple mouse clicks are needed with its tray icon) should a game crash and leave the wrong screen resolution and the desktop icons end up off screen or positioned elsewhere. I decided to learn the Windows 10 GUI instead of lingering on the old Windows 7 GUI, especially since I help others. Not learning the new GUI means I would be clumsy on Windows 10 to help others or even myself when using Win10 computers that weren't mine. So, I found a sufficient freeware alternative (DesktopOK) to Stardock Fences, and didn't bother with their Start10, and instead decided to learn the Windows 10 GUI (plus "Dummies" [e]books are free at the public library). |
#3
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Stardock Curtains
On 8/7/2020 8:45 AM, VanguardLH wrote:
Ken Blake wrote: Does anyone here use Stardock Curtains? What do you think of it? I just installed the free 30-day trial. It seems nice enough, but I don't think it's worth $9.99, and I don't expect to keep it. I can do almost everything it does manually, at no charge. To me, it's fluff, like bedazzling a pair of jeans. Doesn't make the jeans last any longer or add more pockets. But then lots of users like to pretty up their Windows desktop with wallpaper or even slide shows making it busy and making recognition harder (but their desktop is a mess, anyway). I like solid color or white painted walls, and never lay wallpaper over my home's walls. Before Microsoft added the dark theme, I had already switched to a solid black wallpaper (and on my smartphone, too), and some programs already have skins you can choose, so I picked a dark one, before Microsoft provided a dark Windows theme. I don't like flashlights shining into my eyes, even during the day. White on black has more contrast with less light output than black on white (which was used for books because it was cheaper to use bleached paper than dyed black paper). There are times when I'm trying to read a book outside and find the glare from the sun bouncing off the book's pages to be a nuisance. Same for a mostly white screens glaring bright light into my eyes. In bright daylight, I can see white on black text without having to up the brightness level to get black on white to be visible. The only products I ever considered from Stardock was their Fences (freeware) to organize the desktop icons along with restoring their positioning after a screen resolution change (often caused by games, especially since they crash a lot leaving the wrong screen resolution for the desktop) and Start10 ($5) to get a Windows 7-like Start menu. I agree with all the above. I like and use Start10.There are free alternatives that are almost as good, but I prefer and use Start10, especially since it's so inexpensive. -- Ken |
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