Stardock has released an update to DesktopX that addresses some problems found when running it on Windows 98 and Windows ME. Click on the link to get the latest version.

A true shift in the balance of power of skinning -- Mormegil's submissions have put him at the highest ranking skin author for the past few days straight.

This is significant because it's the first time since the site began that the leader didn't come from WindowBlinds.

Mormegil was an early supporter of DesktopX and now literally tens of thousands of people are learning what many of us have appreciated for a long time - Paul (Mormegil) is an incredibly talented designer, artist, and animator.

Way to go Mormegil! When it comes to creative animated things, even Feanor would be humbled by your efforts!

Over the past few days we have broken a few records for the site in number of visitors per day. This is largely due to the increased popularity recently of DesktopX. The main limitation isn't in raw bandwidth but a limitation in server capacity.

Our solution is to upgrade the server. A new server has arrived -- a dual 1Ghz monster machine. We are in the process of setting things up and should have it ready to replace the existing server shortly.

In the meantime, with several hundred users connected to the server at once, we had to decide how best to handle things. Make things unbearable for everyone or make things usable for some.

So we decided the best way is to require until the new server is up during peek times that users have an account here to download skins and themes. This would cut down on traffic as some people won't be willing to do this (Even though it's free and easy). BTW, as a side note, your email addresses are safe, we would not sell them to some spammer as some people on our news groups fear websites sometimes do. We hate spam too - notice there are no banner ads on this website.

Anyway, we hope for things to return to better than normal in a few days time.

We expect things to return to normal in the next couple of days -- or at least close enough to normal that we won't need to require accounts to download skins.

But some itneresting stats:

Over the weekend the website got 13,000 new accounts. To put this in perspective, on Thursday the site had a total of around 6,000 accounts (so we have about 20,000 accounts total).

DesktopX got 47,000 downloads over the weekend just from download.com. These users naturally came somewhere to get more skins and themes which was here.

Very soon we're going to upgrade the server so it can handle more traffic. Bandwidth is only part of the issue, it's purely quantity of users hammering the database. By next week at the latest you should be able to notice a fairly significant performance boost.

http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-1461990-100-6582676.html?tag=sptlt

Those of you who have registered DesktopX or have Object Desktop have no need to go to download.com to get DesktopX.

This creates a problem in that the only ones voting on a program over time become just those who don't register the sofware. This tends to make user reviews biased towards being lower user reviews.

When reading through the reviews on download.com, it's very painful to see how many unbelievable things are said. One review tonight says that we
basically install adware onto people's systems. Another claims we change people's home pages. Obviously, DesktopX doesn't do anything of the sort.

One guy tonight claimed we stole his artwork (naturally an anonymous user).

Vendors are not allowed to post reviews (for obvious reasons) so it's quite maddening seeing these kinds of things. Particularly wrongful claims of spyware and registry tampering. We basically have to just sit there and take it.

For those of you who use DesktopX and would like to have your say, please visit the link at the top of this post. We really appreciate any counter balance possible. Even a few people putting in honest reviews (even if critical) helps.

Again the link is:
http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-1461990-100-6582676.html?tag=sptlt

Thanks!

Hi gang, well, Stardock + WinCustomize had over 75,000 visitors in a single day yesterday. This kind of traffic would put us within the top 500 most popular websites worldwide if we maintained that level. Luckily for our bandwidth, it won't stay that high. But it does represent a sneak peak of what is likely to occur once Windows XP ships.

But as a result, during these peek hours, we're going to start requiring those who wish to use the skin library to create an account (which is free). As soon as the traffic curves back to normal somewhat we can return to the unrestricted library access.

Which 3 t-shirt ideas would you guys like to see made first?

If you could go over to the T-shirt section and comment, rate, whatever the T0shirt ideas and comment in this post, we could get an idea of which ideas are liked the most and start making T-shirts.

The Register has done a run down on Stardock's DesktopX 1.0. Check it out.

The USS Clueless is a great site full of philosophical writings on virtually any topic. Highly recommended.

I was wondering if anyone would be interested in a lengthy article that *really* told what to expect with Windows XP? Something detailed that targets "Regular people" and not just techies or corporations.

If there's enough interest, I'll try to take a few hours this week to write up smething that tours Windows XP and talks about how it compares with win2k and Winme and all that.

Let me know if you're interested.