All I wanted
Monday, December 13, 2010 by remmy123 | Discussion: Animated Wallpapers
All I wanted was the "Dream Machine" wallpaper. That is all I wanted. Here I am running Vista 32bit with more than marginal specs (see imbedded pic below) and I get nothing but Deskscapes crashing. Im now $40 in the whole over one freaking wallpaper. BUT ITS ALL I WANTED AND I CANT GET IT WITHOUT DESKSCAPES CRASHING AND ME HAVING TO UNINSTALL/REINSTALL THE SOFTWARE. Im not a typical computer moron. I have a decent idea what I am doing. Nevermind the fact that I had to jump through huge hoops just to get here after I figured out all of the scattered software Stardock throws at you. I have never met more expensive and unstable software. Never mind that I need to be somewhat computer literate, its just not worth it so far... especially for paying the kind of cash to use such a program.
I could use a little help if anybody has any ideas. But other than that at this point, I want my $40 back. 
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Reply #22 Friday, December 17, 2010 8:29 AM
Don't know. I was having performance issues with photoshop 'blanking out', meaning the screen would go completely white for a few seconds then come back. Then my laptop would slow to a crawl, some programs would refuse to load and then i got mad. Went on a un-install frenzy and took out fifteen programs that I either didn't use or were out of date (because I got better ones). One of the programs I uninstalled was Fences. Had to because for some reason it was not playing nice with both photoshop and others. Since then my laptop is running at peak performance. As far as Dreamscapes go ... no way. Tried it once and my laptop almost had a heart attack. Fences is more novelty than functional app anyway and Dreamscapes can tax even bigger and better machines than mine.
Reply #23 Friday, December 17, 2010 9:21 AM
Just in case you missed it, Neil replied to the other threads about this. 
Reply #24 Friday, December 17, 2010 9:37 AM
Repeat after me...the program is DeskScapes.
More than likely it was the way the Dream was encoded that was causing the slow down. On Dynamic and Hybrid Dreams you shouldn't notice a slow down at all.
Most Dreams are just a video running and the type of format and the bitrate that was used during encoding really effects the amount of CPU required to run the video / Dream. A Dream created from a WMV format video will require a noticeable amount of CPU over a MPEG2 Dream. This is especially noticeable on a older single core processor system.
You should at least give it another try for Dynamic Dreams and Static wallpaper. That way you can at least use the effects that are available in DeskScapes..
Reply #25 Friday, December 17, 2010 9:48 AM
Reply #26 Friday, December 17, 2010 9:55 AM
Hi, remmy123....
First potential 'culprits' as to why a Dream in Deskcapes might fail are either the particular graphic driver and/or appropriate video codec required for a particular animation.
If the proggy runs flawlessly with the included dreams then it's a likely bet it's a codec issue.
I wasn't going to bring it up but since you did, you missed it by 1 letter. 
Reply #28 Friday, December 17, 2010 5:11 PM
I'll call that, and bump you "Hybrid Dreams." 
All those are really nice and run quite easily on my old single core cpu / agp video card.
I've even played with creating a couple of Hybrids. Really pretty easy to do in terms of the Deskscapes part of it, but making the animation, even my little hacky ones, proved to be a real challenge. I probably did it "the hard way" 
Kind of fun though.
Reply #29 Tuesday, December 21, 2010 8:06 PM
I'm just happy it all worked out for him in the end. What a wonderful Christmas story!
Reply #31 Tuesday, December 21, 2010 9:34 PM
I have to agree.
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Reply #21 Thursday, December 16, 2010 11:41 PM
I wanna know why my dreams freeze on XP whenever I hit the start button. And Fences has to be turned off for dreams to work.