Posts tagged general

This week’s column isn’t going to incite nearly as much anger as last week’s. I was just reminiscing about the earlier days of Neowin and this is what resulted from it.

Windows XP was ugly. There was no way around that fact. The default Luna interface looked as though it was drawn by a crayon on a crumpled up napkin. Nothing about it was clean or polished. It was bad enough that, after a while, Microsoft released the Royale visual style to spruce up the appearance of their star operating system. However, before Royale, there was a large community dedicated to changing the appearance of XP. A few select members of that community were celebrities, in their own right, and had a large portion of the geek community captivated by their works of art.

Many artists, such as Neowin’s own Kol, Bant, and , jumped onto the scene, shortly after XP was released, and started to create beautiful new visual styles for it. You didn’t even have to pay for them, though some of the pieces were surely worth a lot more than the free price tag attached to them. All you had to do was download a small program, let it patch your uxtheme.dll system file (regardless what some companies would have you believe, it’s perfectly safe), and install any visual style of your choosing. It seemed as though every week a new theme was coming out as these artists consistently pushed the threshold in an attempt to cover the face of that ugly baby known as XP.

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Column for the week has just been post:

For my generation, AOL was the Internet as we all signed on for the first time. Even if you didn’t use their dialup service, you absolutely had to download AOL Instant Messenger , so you could stay in contact with all of your friends. Let’s face it: Cell phones were still way too expensive, so instant messages were the text messages of that time. It was almost a social faux pa to be in high school without a screen name. And, while you were there typing away and entering chat rooms your parents probably wouldn’t want you in, you had to have some music playing. In came Winamp and, once AOL bought them out, it was an all AOL, all the time experience. So, what the heck is AOL doing now?

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Here’s the latest in my weekly column on Neowin:

…With laughter in the background, my blood pressure rising, and an excessive amount of gratitude being given, the woman on the other end did everything from getting my console ID and serial number to having me clear my cache. The last step, by the way, involves losing all the game updates I ever downloaded, so every game I play now has to be updated, again. Best of all, none of this worked. I’m starting to really hate you, Microsoft.

After 30 minutes of complete failure, my case was moved up to a supervisor and she was the most useless of them all. At least the first representative admitted she knew nothing. This wonderfully useless supervisor simply asked me to fax over a copy of my receipts for when I exchanged my Xbox 360 at Best Buy. Slight problem: I don’t own a fax machine and, right now, I don’t have a printer to scan with. She advised me to use my “digi cam” to snap a photo of the receipts and use FaxZero.com to send the photo over. She was about to hang up when I kindly reminded her that she needed to tell me the number to fax it to. Slight oversight on her part, huh?…

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