For SD staff who may be monitoring:

Installing DeskScapes on my XPP SP2 notebook (NVIDIA 8600M GT 512MB RAMDAC) rendered IP4's shell icon replacement (repair) non-functional.  Uninstalling it restored shell icon functionality to normal.

In addition, DeskScapes installed without a problem, but as soon as I would select one of the default dreams & click Apply, it would generate a "RunDLL as an app" crash.

Neil's responses specifically mentioned AGP ATI cards, so your GeForce 7600GS should work fine (it's a DX9 card, I think--I know I ran DX9 with the 7300GS in my old machine).

Warreni...it's workin...kinda...but when I open deskscapes...choose a theme and then click apply....I keep getting "AGP Card detected. Deskscapes 2.5 is not compatible with your video card at this time. Please click No or Cancel to read the compatibility information. Try applying Dream anyway?" but some don't work at all. One didn't apply at all and another one said someting about Mpeg 4.

Any further feedback on the 'RunDLL as an app' crash when applying a dream in XPP (NVIDIA notebook)?  I probably won't use DeskScapes until the IP4 conflict gets resolved, but I'm curious.

Oversight in what way? If you have a crappy computer it's probably not a good idea to run animated wallpaper.

DeskScapes is software, not magic.

It would be helpful if people stopped making up statistics.

A system with less than an 8X AGP slot is more than just a little old, it's downright ancient.  Even 8X AGP is very old.  

I would guess that fewer than a fifth of users aren't capable of 8X AGP or better.

DeskScapes has always had a DirectX 9 requirement. Always. As in, from day 1.  The number of users with a video card that supports DirectX 9 but isn't 8x AGP is tiny - miniscule.  In fact, is there a single person reading this whose video card supports DirectX 9 that's also running on a 4X or less AGP slot?  The card would have to be almost 8 years old at the least.

So I think some of you need to get a bit of a grip here and stop being so quick to jump on us.  

BTW, DeskScapes also doesn't support EGA cards either.

Edit - error.

Actually yes.  I have a 9800SE with a P4 2.4Ghz which has an 845 chipset thats AGP 4x only.

The key thing to understand is AGP 8x and PCIE were invented for a reason and Deskscapes is showing why AGP 4x and lower were replaced.

Hm. Well, I guess you should email support to check on this. I was just reading what Neil said earlier in the thread, so maybe it's because you have the slower 4x bus? Do you know whether you have a 2x/4x/8x AGP interface?

Okay but the ATI 9800SE was one of the very least AGP 4x and it's almost 5 years old.

The point I'm making still stands, the people who said "70% of users.." pulled that number out of thin air.  The number of users who have AGP 4X at this point, running XP, who would even remotely be into this kind of thing is tiny.

Let's face it, we're talking about animated wallpaper. If you have an ancient machine, common sense should tell you that it's not going to be something you can use.

Is no one gonna respond to this question?

I believe the more memory on the video card the better.  I have an older Nvidia AGP card with 256mb of ram and DeskScapres runs very slow.  Having enough system ram is also important, I have 2gb.  I need to decide if I upgrade the video card or not.  Do you know if you have a AGP or PCI video card?

If you all ready have a subscription to Object Desktop that is current just load the updates and you will have the 2009 version.  You should still be able to do it through SDC, but I would load up Impulse, it's the future for downloading Stardock programs.

Hope I helped you some.

Just a quick note to day an old fashioned PCI card (rather than PCI Express) will not work.

Plain PCI cards are rare and always low end, but there will be some around still in older pcs.

Does anyone know what codecs are needed to run dreams on XP?

it depends on how the dream was encoded.

I used teh cccp ones and did ok.

Thanks for the responses, oh boy I guess I made a mistake then,

Time of this report: 11/26/2008, 12:27:42
       Machine name: JAMIE-7U0AXESF0
   Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3 (2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.080814-1236)
           Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: INTEL_
       System Model: D945GCR_
               BIOS: Default System BIOS
          Processor: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.66GHz
             Memory: 1012MB RAM
          Page File: 572MB used, 1862MB available
        Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
    DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
     DxDiag Version: 5.03.2600.5512 32bit Unicode

Could anyone look at this info and tell me if I would be able to run the Deskcapes properly, I think I just have a regular PCI card I don't think it's PCI Express. I just bought OD yesterday for the first time from a standalone upgrade. I thought it would be a bargain even though I already have most of what OD offers, just to get the rest of the program. Should I delete SC and download Impulse? I'm sorry I don't know much of anything

Well, I think Frogboy or Neil said earlier that cards running on the original spec PCI bus are probably too slow to handle DeskScapes.

I believe you can download anything that you need using Stardock Central but I don't know how much longer updates will be available through that client.