looks great but fails so hard on reboot

from Stardock Forums

Can I get a refund? I bought Windowblinds and Start10 yesterday, installed both, *loved* them, and it completely hoses my system. I had to install win 10 again today, and I just hosed it again trying out windowblinds... just to make sure, clicking the no system wide fonts box, etc... I do love the way it looks, but shit. It's a new system fwiw. If I had anything on here, I'd be f'ing pissed. I'll have to install a 3rd f'ing time tomorrow. I'm already mad b/c I spent days setting this thing up... and in the process of trying to fix this windowblinds thing I corrupted the system!

Every time I reboot, it blanks the screen, monitor goes into power saving mode (says no input), and I'm just plain f'd. Doing a system restore to before the installation doesn't help *at all*.

I'm running an AMD Ryzen 2700x, radeon vega56... so maybe there's some other conflicts here, but I mean... I wish I had read the forums before buying this. I wish there was a warning on the software page saying this might not be all that compatible with win10 at the moment, etc....

Mostly I just wish it worked b/c it's gorgeous.

I also can't for the life of me figure out why microsoft doesn't have some kind of basic win 7 look... some way of doing the basics of what this software does, because wow, IMO win10 is ugly. So I wish this software worked!

Maybe someone can point me in the direction of how I can fix this without reinstalling windows! It's up-to-date when I install windowblinds. Currently windowblinds is uninstalled but the best I can do is get into safe mode.. and then do what, I'm not sure.

 

 

windowblinds
5,065 views 6 replies
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top

I'm not offering this as a "fix" but merely as a tool that might be helpful while you're struggling with this:

To completely prevent WindowBlinds from loading at boot, hold down the [Ctrl] key while you're pressing [Enter] to log in at the login screen.

WindowBlinds - Free yourself of the default settings, customize your desktop.
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

The purge.bat seemed to do the trick btw.

And thanks for the tip! I so want this software to work! Aargh...Sorry to be dramatic!

Hmmm... I think one of my main problems here is that I disabled the login screen, so e.g. reading up on how to do a safe boot, the recommended method is at that screen that I no longer see! :) It goes from loading windows directly to no display if I have windowblinds installed. [trying to mash keys to get to a safe mode, and failing, is why I had to reboot so often that I think the system got corrupted... though there's probably a better way to do a soft reboot now that I read up on it... doh]

FWIW, it's a powercooler vega56, MSI M7 'gaming' motherboard (x470), ryzen 2700x, windows 10 pro with latest updates. Acer 27" LCD (K272HUL).

And every now and then, instead of a totally blank screen after the initial windows loading (where the monitor would shut off b/c of a lack of input), it would do some kind of vertical bands of color, to me looking like the graphics memory was being addressed wrong. Basically the graphics drivers get completely f'd, and/or explorer does, I dunno.

Maybe this is what I get for going all AMD. :) I knew it was a little risky. But there's got to be an update for this software on the way, right? I'm sure there is.

Also, I totally had this same problem with ClassicShell. Basically it would boot successfully maybe half the time. I uninstalled it, had a stable system.. and then I figured stardock would be far more stable b/c I had to pay for it!

So my bad for not checking first I guess. I still want it to work. But this is also a dev machine where I'll be using visual studio 2012 all day, every day. I'm not sure how that works with windowblinds, but I definitely saw the thread about the problems with the latest visual studio.

Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Windowblinds can be thoroughly stable on Win 10, only Microsoft has decided that Win 10 is to be a forced beta process that simply means you [everyone] is being forced to take whatever useless [buggy] update they think we all need....when we often actually know better.

Think of Win 10 as a game of Russian Roulette.... eg the last update I did on a laptop hosed Microsoft's own 'Edge'.

If they can't be trusted to keep their own proggies working God help all the third party programmers....cos Redmond isn't.

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

:) I mean the main reason I got pro instead of home is so I could delay updates! 

OK, point taken. I mean I might try to install win7 on this machine, but I so doubt it'd work out well, it being a very new cpu/mobo, etc., etc. I would have preferred to. 

Reply #6 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Delaying updates really just delays the heartache...;)

Yes, modern hardware can make an older OS 'difficult' ....my machine was state-of-the-art [about as good as you could get] 2 and a bit years ago....and it required a bit of skull-duggery to work with 7 ....eg...the OS had no idea what DDR4 was...;)