Thread: new windows shell & 'shell=' for win2K

okay got 2 things to share with you all that I stumbled onto today.... sorry if this has been covered before!

Came across a nice piece of software today, more exactly a new windows 95/98/ME/2K/XP shell program. Called 'Cloud9ine', I have installed it on my work computer (hey would rather crash that than my home system! ) and it is really sweet.

Gets rid of the stocky start/task bar, replaced with nice little floating toobars/utils. Best way to understand it is to try it - could prove to be not only a good change to your desktop PC's windows OS but might be a good addition for mp3car systems too.

Only about 1MB or so in size and has been written entirely in VB6 with freely available source code.... making the ability to pump out a custom windows shell that little bit easier to start. Uses a cool little plugin .dll system for its utilities too.... more utilis/dll's are available for download which give things like enhanced clocks/cpu usage graphs/startbars/etc......

get it all from http://cloud9ine.com/

secondly, reading the help section tells on howto make cloud9ine the new shell, replacing explorer.exe..... we all know the 'shell=explorer.exe' change in system.ini for 95/98/ME, but I was not aware of the ability to do this with Win2K!!!!! Heres how.... the settings are in the windows registry...


goto 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon' there you should find a value "shell" with the value "explorer.exe" - just change this to what you want the shell to be (winamp/etc/etc).

then goto 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion=Winlogon' and do the same thing with the 'shell' key.

if the keys dont exist, just add a new 'string' with the key/value setting. and your done!!! handy eh? I know have 'cloud9ine' as my shell on my work system, getting rid of the startbutton/taskbar... a bit of a nice change!


sorry for 'another!' long rant! but I think one/both of these finds were worth the mention.... I would be keen to see what others think of this new shell option..