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BootSkin
BootSkin is a computer program for Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista that allows users to change the screen displayed while the operating system is booting. It is made by Stardock, and distributed for free under the WinCustomize brand. BootSkin uses a boot-time device driver (vidstub.sys) to access the display directly using VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE), unlike other bootscreen changers which alter the boot screen image inside the kernel. This has the advantage of not modifying system files, and makes higher-resolution boot screens possible; standard boot screens are limited to 640x480 with 16 colors. Some graphics cards and chipsets do not support VBE well, preventing their use with BootSkin. Due to severe restrictions on color depth, many images are not suitable for use as boot skins. Successful skins tend to take advantage of the limitations through the use of a limited palette and dithering. Installing BootSkin unattended is simple matter of using the /silen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BootSkin Creatures Eggs16
BootSkin is a computer program for Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista that allows users to change the screen displayed while the operating system is booting. It is made by Stardock, and distributed for free under the WinCustomize brand. BootSkin uses a boot-time device driver (vidstub.sys) to access the display directly using VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE), unlike other bootscreen changers which alter the boot screen image inside the kernel. This has the advantage of not modifying system files, and makes higher-resolution boot screens possible; standard boot screens are limited to 640x480 with 16 colors. Some graphics cards and chipsets do not support VBE well, preventing their use with BootSkin. Due to severe restrictions on color depth, many images are not suitable for use as boot skins. Successful skins tend to take advantage of the limitations through the use of a limited palette and dithering. Installing BootSkin unattended is simple matter of using t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
WinCustomize
WinCustomize is a website that provides content for users to customize Microsoft Windows. The site hosts thousands of skins, themes, icons, wallpapers, and other graphical content to modify the Windows graphical user interface. There is some premium or paid content, however, the vast majority of the content is free for users to download. Site history WinCustomize was launched in March 2001 by Brad Wardell and Pat Ford, both of whom work at Stardock. After the dot-com recession had taken down many popular skin sites, WinCustomize quickly grew in popularity due to a combination of wide variety of content, uptime reliability, and being the preferred content destination by Stardock customers. The site has grown at a far greater pace than its founders had anticipated. It has managed to avoid having to put many limitations on users or having to resort to pop-up advertising because of its corporate patron Stardock subsidizing its costs. This growth has prompted several site rede ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kernel (computer Science)
The kernel is a computer program at the core of a computer's operating system and generally has complete control over everything in the system. It is the portion of the operating system code that is always resident in memory and facilitates interactions between hardware and software components. A full kernel controls all hardware resources (e.g. I/O, memory, cryptography) via device drivers, arbitrates conflicts between processes concerning such resources, and optimizes the utilization of common resources e.g. CPU & cache usage, file systems, and network sockets. On most systems, the kernel is one of the first programs loaded on startup (after the bootloader). It handles the rest of startup as well as memory, peripherals, and input/output (I/O) requests from software, translating them into data-processing instructions for the central processing unit. The critical code of the kernel is usually loaded into a separate area of memory, which is protected from access by applicati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DeviantArt
DeviantArt (historically stylized as deviantART) is an American online art community that features artwork, videography and photography, launched on August 7, 2000 by Angelo Sotira, Scott Jarkoff, and Matthew Stephens among others. DeviantArt, Inc. is headquartered in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles, California. DeviantArt had about 36 million visitors annually by 2008. In 2010, DeviantArt users were submitting about 1.4 million favorites and about 1.5 million comments daily. In 2011, it was the thirteenth largest social network with about 3.8 million weekly visits. Several years later, in 2017, the site had more than 25 million members and more than 250 million submissions. On February 23, 2017, the company announced it was being acquired by Wix.com in a $36 million deal. History Creation DeviantArt started as a site connected with people who took computer applications and modified them to their own tastes, or who posted the applications from the original designs. As the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dither
Dither is an intentionally applied form of image noise, noise used to randomize quantization error, preventing large-scale patterns such as color banding in images. Dither is routinely used in processing of both digital audio and digital video, video data, and is often one of the last stages of Audio mastering, mastering audio to a compact disc, CD. A common use of dither is converting a grayscale image to Binary image, black and white, such that the density of black dots in the new image approximates the average gray level in the original. Etymology The term ''dither'' was published in books on analog computation and hydraulically controlled guns shortly after World War II. Though he did not use the term ''dither'', the concept of dithering to reduce quantization patterns was first applied by Lawrence G. Roberts in his 1961 MIT master's thesis and 1962 article. By 1964 dither was being used in the modern sense described in this article. The technique was in use at least ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palette (computing)
In computer graphics, a palette is the set of available colors from which an image can be made. In some systems, the palette is fixed by the hardware design, and in others it is dynamic, typically implemented via a color lookup table (CLUT), a correspondence table in which selected colors from a certain color space's color reproduction range are assigned an index, by which they can be referenced. By referencing the colors via an index, which takes less information than needed to describe the actual colors in the color space, this technique aims to reduce data usage, including processing, transfer bandwidth, RAM usage, and storage. Images in which colors are indicated by references to a CLUT are called indexed color images. Description As of 2019, the most common image colorspace in graphics cards is the RGB color model with 8 bits per pixel color depth. Using this technique, 8 bits per pixel are used to describe the luminance level in each of the RGB channels, therefore 24 b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Color Depth
Color depth or colour depth (see spelling differences), also known as bit depth, is either the number of bits used to indicate the color of a single pixel, or the number of bits used for each color component of a single pixel. When referring to a pixel, the concept can be defined as bits per pixel (bpp). When referring to a color component, the concept can be defined as bits per component, bits per channel, bits per color (all three abbreviated bpc), and also bits per pixel component, bits per color channel or bits per sample (bps). Modern standards tend to use bits per component, but historical lower-depth systems used bits per pixel more often. Color depth is only one aspect of color representation, expressing the precision with which the amount of each primary can be expressed; the other aspect is how broad a range of colors can be expressed (the gamut). The definition of both color precision and gamut is accomplished with a color encoding specification which assigns a digita ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chipset
In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components An electronic component is any basic discrete device or physical entity in an electronic system used to affect electrons or their associated fields. Electronic components are mostly industrial products, available in a singular form and are no ... in one or more integrated circuits known as a "Data Flow Management System" that manages the data flow between the Central processing unit, processor, computer memory, memory and peripherals. It is usually found on the motherboard. Chipsets are usually designed to work with a specific family of microprocessors. Because it controls communications between the processor and external devices, the chipset plays a crucial role in determining Computer performance, system performance. Computers In computing, the term ''chipset'' commonly refers to a set of specialized integrated circuit, chips on a computer's motherboard or an expansion card. In personal computers, the first ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Graphics Card
A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer monitor. Graphics cards are sometimes called discrete or dedicated graphics cards to emphasize their distinction to Graphics processing unit#Integrated graphics, integrated graphics. A graphics processing unit that performs the necessary computations is the main component of a graphics card, but the acronym "GPU" is sometimes also used to refer to the graphics card as a whole. Most graphics cards are not limited to simple display output. The graphics processing unit can be used for additional processing, which reduces the load from the central processing unit. Additionally, computing platforms such as OpenCL and CUDA allow using graphics cards for General-purpose computing on graphics processing units, general-purpose computing. Applications o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Display Resolution
The display resolution or display modes of a digital television, computer monitor or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. It can be an ambiguous term especially as the displayed resolution is controlled by different factors in cathode ray tube (CRT) displays, flat-panel displays (including liquid-crystal displays) and projection displays using fixed picture-element (pixel) arrays. It is usually quoted as ', with the units in pixels: for example, ' means the width is 1024 pixels and the height is 768 pixels. This example would normally be spoken as "ten twenty-four by seven sixty-eight" or "ten twenty-four by seven six eight". One use of the term ''display resolution'' applies to fixed-pixel-array displays such as plasma display panels (PDP), liquid-crystal displays (LCD), Digital Light Processing (DLP) projectors, OLED displays, and similar technologies, and is simply the physical number of columns and rows of pixels creating ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Device Driver
In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and other computer programs to access hardware functions without needing to know precise details about the hardware being used. A driver communicates with the device through the computer bus or communications subsystem to which the hardware connects. When a calling program invokes a routine in the driver, the driver issues commands to the device (drives it). Once the device sends data back to the driver, the driver may invoke routines in the original calling program. Drivers are hardware dependent and operating-system-specific. They usually provide the interrupt handling required for any necessary asynchronous time-dependent hardware interface. Purpose The main purpose of device drivers is to provide abstraction by acting as a translator be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
VESA BIOS Extensions
VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE) is a VESA standard, currently at version 3, that defines the interface that can be used by software to access compliant video boards at high resolutions and bit depths. This is opposed to the "traditional" int 10h BIOS calls, which are limited to resolutions of 640×480 pixels with 16 color (4-bit) depth or less. VBE is made available through the video card's BIOS, which installs during boot up some interrupt vectors that point to itself. Most newer cards implement the more capable VBE 3.0 standard. Older versions of VBE provide only a real mode interface, which cannot be used without a significant performance penalty from within protected mode operating systems. Consequently, the VBE standard has almost never been used for writing a video card's drivers; each vendor has thus had to invent a proprietary protocol for communicating with its own video card. Despite this, it is common that a driver thunk out to the real mode interrupt in order to initial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
