Need help optimizing windows 7 GUI so I can do other testing!

I have 2 major projects I am working on:
1. How to make Win 7 snappier and based off how good your hardware is
2. Test the actual real world impact of single thread, multithread, DRAM latency, SSD latency (XPoint) on system performance but I need to remove GUI fixed animations first of course!

I am fairly certain that Windows 7 GUI has a lot of fixed animations and I want to remove them or make them dynamic if possible.

I would also like to make a guide with the information I get from everyone so that others can make the UI faster and snappier.

Does anyone know of what can be turned off or edited to make the OS as snappy as your computer actually is?

One item i am almost certain takes longer to load than necessary is explorer and the likes. They have this fading in and out crap that is smancy but eats time to load and ruins responsiveness.

As everyone knows i am a pursuer of the snappiest system possible so I could use and would like help in trying to make Win 7 as snappy as possible.

Calculator and explorer appear to have some weird fixed opening speed no matter how fast your PC is while paint is near instant pop up and does not have that fixed animation. Not sure if your guy's system is a fast as mine but i love how fast Paint opens vs explorer and calc.

This applies to everything including browsers so lets make the OS as snappy was possible!

If you haven't read IBMs research in regards to system responsiveness and the importance of it see the linked article. They have found sub 1s response times showed large reductions in how long it takes a user to complete a taste. See images below and check out the source documents. This is a large reason why I want to further research this area and what can be done to improve it and what barriers exist.

http://jlelliotton.blogspot.ca/p/the-economic-value-of-rapid-response.html

Lastly,
This is also a critical part that needs to be done before i can do my testing of single thread, DRAM latency, XPoint vs SSD, and so on in regard to how they affect the responsiveness of the OS and other programs! So I want to start on this while i got the time before I build a kaby lack build to test and show how single thread, multithread, DRAM latency, and SSD latency affect system performance.

For this to be as objectively and accurate as possible these fixed delays must be removed or my primary goals to show how much or how little these affect systems will be meaningless and wasted.

My initial impressions from my experience is that single thread is a large limiting factor in the responsiveness of a system and i have a few other sneaking suspicions but I'll post all this as I go.

My goal is to figure out what the limiting factors current computer are facing in responsiveness and what can be done to improve it and what upgrades are entirely wasteful to get.

People say faster SSDs (bandwidth and latency) don't help or single thread is not a limiting factor... well i want to prove it!...or disprove it I think finally having a real answer will help everyone to know what is a worth while upgrade and what does and doesn't help improve performance.

I am sure everyone gets what i am getting at so i don't need to ramble on with more examples.

Thanks for your help guys! I hope to finish all this testing and post my results by the end of the year.

A couple of basic tweaks:

Start>Run>SystemPropertiesPerformance - turn off animations, sliders, fades...
Make Aero Peek Display Instantly (or Disable it) in Windows 7
Windows 7: Menu Show Delay Time
Windows 7: Taskbar Thumbnail Previews - Change Delay Time

it appears it was already instant on my PC for taskbaranimation and Desktop Aero peek unless it opens automatically at 1 even though thats not the current setting?

Some of the settings i don't get what they do. Is this a good set of settings? Any comments appreciated.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wawphe96p2uspqk/Areo settings.png?dl=0

like what is:
animate controls and elements inside windows
Animations in taskbar and start menu
Enable desktop composition
save taskbar thumbnail previews
slide open combo boxes
smooth edges of screen fonts
smooth-scroll list boxes


Thanks for that good info.

SomeGuy133 said:

Some of the settings i don't get what they do. Is this a good set of settings? Any comments appreciated.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wawphe96p2uspqk/Areo settings.png?dl=0

Click to expand...

It's been years since I've experimented with each setting so can't help you with details, but those are the ones I've been turning off since Win7 came out and find it much snappier that way. Maybe not all of them make a noticeable difference, but I always turn off animations on all my devices as they more often than not just slow down the usage.

yea i was able to find a couple of those with some googling but a couple i am lost but from what i gathered what i have selected is exactly what i want in regards to those settings. The save previews might be someone i want to enable but i am not sure if its worth it considering what my PC is.

I think there's a gap between what seems snappy and whether it actually slows down usage. For example, you can turn off animations (or Aero) in Windows 7 and things will appear to quickly switch, but those animations and fades don't actually affect the speed of task completion.

Unlike the single-threaded model those old IBM response time studies are based on, the Windows 7 compositing manager (DWM) just spits off the task to DX9 which minimizes CPU overhead for running the effects. Unless you have a really low end GPU, leaving Aero enabled isn't going to increase response time in normal usage. For example, even a single core Atom with GMA 3100 graphics and sufficient memory can run Windows 7 Aero effects perfectly fine (except maybe Aero Flip 3D when many windows are open... it will be choppy).

If you had some critical real-time application which needed to finish complex tasks on fixed time schedules and it used the GUI heavily, that might be a case where it make sense to disable DWM and all animations since unexpected GUI events may cause problems in such a fragile state. That's really stretching for a situation where response time is critical though.

I think there's a better case for turning off Aero or animations because you don't like them, rather than having it enabled causes some kind of meaningful responsiveness degradation.

Otherwise, remember it's 2016 now and even semi-current hardware has no problem running Windows 7 with Aero enabled.

Max/minimize animations definitely slow things down and affect workflow.

pxc said:

I think there's a gap between what seems snappy and whether it actually slows down usage. For example, you can turn off animations (or Aero) in Windows 7 and things will appear to quickly switch, but those animations and fades don't actually affect the speed of task completion.

Unlike the single-threaded model those old IBM response time studies are based on, the Windows 7 compositing manager (DWM) just spits off the task to DX9 which minimizes CPU overhead for running the effects. Unless you have a really low end GPU, leaving Aero enabled isn't going to increase response time in normal usage. For example, even a single core Atom with GMA 3100 graphics and sufficient memory can run Windows 7 Aero effects perfectly fine (except maybe Aero Flip 3D when many windows are open... it will be choppy).

If you had some critical real-time application which needed to finish complex tasks on fixed time schedules and it used the GUI heavily, that might be a case where it make sense to disable DWM and all animations since unexpected GUI events may cause problems in such a fragile state. That's really stretching for a situation where response time is critical though.

I think there's a better case for turning off Aero or animations because you don't like them, rather than having it enabled causes some kind of meaningful responsiveness degradation.

Otherwise, remember it's 2016 now and even semi-current hardware has no problem running Windows 7 with Aero enabled.

Click to expand...

Meeho said:

Max/minimize animations definitely slow things down and affect workflow.

Click to expand...

Yea no....the animations are definitely a fixed time period...windows is very much more responsive since i turned it off. They are a fixed time animation without a doubt and make things have a delay to open no matter of system specs because its a fixed animation and not dynamic.

Also as IBM clearly reproduced from a separate study is that humans attention span is very much affected by short delays and we do not actually think about our next move because we already have it planned). There was a dramatic improvement in response times of users from from 1s to .6s to .3 seconds shown above. Thats the same thing with online games and computer screens with input lag and the likes. I can tell when i use various programs when there is a 1 or 2 second delay i do actually notice my attention span and thought line up of my next actions takes a hit and i pause to regain my though of what i am doing next. This is particularly noticeable when doing something repetitive like clicking on programs and folders in Win 7. What i mean as in repetitive is i know what i want to do next because i have clicks on those folders countless times already. (granted i also have had my brain badly fried so that just makes it worse inregards to my focus)

Now no one has studied this but from my personal experience rapid changes in contrast and images can be quite jarring for me personally. So a white window poping up very quickly on my black background kinda...cant think of the right word but it kinda stuns me as in i loose my train of thought due to how fast it pops up with rapid contrast changes and it distracts me. This is something where the fading can be helpful if implemented correctly. Also when i open explorer with animations off it loads in very fast blocks, which is also annoying. I plan on trying to record the transitions down the road. A rapid but smooth transition in my eyes is critical.

This has always been a pet peeve of mine with OS makers and their lack of interest in actually making an OS that is productive. There are many aspects of how human minds work and various ways to build a GUI that works with it and not against it. Smooth transitions, easy on the eyes, using contrast in the right spots, rapid speed, and so on.

Anyways, i am going more indepth than i intended but i hope that time explaining wasn't wasted.

EDIT: side note this also is a major issue with sights. Notebookreview forum has a very good layout with the right information large and the right information with contrast. They changed the layout and the site was so much more annoying to use. I have screen shots of the two layouts somewhere. If i think about it i'll post it as an example of what i mean.

and dont get me started on how terrible windows OS is in regards to how they keep regressing in their layout. I loathe windows but nothing is comparable for what i do.

I've always, always, always set Ease of Access > Make it easier to focus on tasks > Turn off all unnecessary animations (when possible).

I even set it as the default behavior for the Windows machines we deploy at work.

I dont have the right equipement to test this yet but i just wanted to get a peek at this and i am shocked....if i did the math right.

so if i did this right I think explorer (My Computer) opens in about 50ms on my computer and paint takes about 110-130ms to open. My dropbox camera uploads explorer window takes 80-90ms to open. I am dumb founded that i can actually tell a difference between the three and my eyes can tell a difference. I didn't realize these opened that fast and i can even tell a difference between the threes loading times -_-

Wow this is seriously going to be an interesting experiment.

BTW that was with animations turned off and its definitely faster. When i do this I will do an example between windows animations and without for comparison.

SomeGuy133 said:

like what is:
animate controls and elements inside windows
Animations in taskbar and start menu
Enable desktop composition
save taskbar thumbnail previews
slide open combo boxes
smooth edges of screen fonts
smooth-scroll list boxes
Thanks for that good info.

Click to expand...

Animate controls... - example: the fade in/fade out effect when you mouseover the scrollbar
Animations in taskbar... - see above
Desktop composition: delegation of rendering requests to the Window Manager instead of writing to video memory. The Window Manager is responsible for maintaining a consistent look and feel of individual windows. I'm guessing a misbehaving program will appear as an unresponsive square of garbage, while with DWM this would be handled gracefully.
Everything related to saving thumbnails is a gray area to me. These are tiny images, so I don't know what is worse - having them rendered once and cached or use the 'live' one.
Slide open combo boxes- You probably know combo boxes are 'lists' you can expand vertically with pre-defined values. This toggles if they should expand with an animation or just go from closed to open instantly.
Smooth edges of screen fonts - self explanatory, I don't know if there's an impact
Smooth scrolling - again, it simply toggles between smoothly traversing lists or whole pages and jerky 'jumps'. This one is iffy because smooth scrolling is easier on the eyes than sudden 'flashes'.
If you want the UI out of the question you probably want to take GPU acceleration out of the question as well. Although it's supposed to offload the CPU, Murphy's law states - it can probably eventually fail or misbehave.
For the checks, I would discourage installing any 'video filters' or 'codec packs'. If you go into a folder with videos, that codec will be used to pick out a frame to be used as a thumbnail. I have seen this crash XP and older Windowses. People couldn't believe how a 'codec for movies' would crash their Desktop to a bluescreen.
Some thumbnails are 'good', because they are stored in a special area of the "big" file and they are for this specific reason.
Aside video frames, Windows gathers metadata about files it sees to improve searching and simply let you know what you have. It's cool when you hover over a JPEG and Windows displays a little popup with the camera model used
Read this about metadata in explorer: http://superuser.com/questions/7389...m-slowly-reading-file-content-to-create-metad
Also look at thumbnails that are pulled from image folders and placed on the folder's icon.
Indexing might be an issue, but I'm not sure it's an UI problem or below the hood problem.

Also, another problem with the method of study: even animations can be cached! so, what you will interpret as a binary "slow" or "fast" opinion, you may be looking at Windows' caching at work actually. And not the speed of the rendering.
And then there's placebo. Before you get mad at me, I will tell you this story:
I once had a soundcard with several socketed operational amplifiers. I was convinced there are two amplifiers in the sound signal path, with one being a unity gain buffer for impedance matching (like on the Prodigy HD2) and one high gain amplifier. Changing either would cause me to hear differences.
And then I went to town with a strong light, magnifying lense and soon realised my 'buffer' wasn't a buffer but simply acted as an amplifier for rear channels. This was after I had years of experience with listening and comparing under my belt.

Something i have been curious of and i really want to test but i doubt i have the time is to compare dedicated GPU performance to integrated. I remember an article i believe from anandtech that showed intels iGPU was substantially faster than a dedicated GPU because of the added latency of PCIe to the CPU. They reported windows was noticeable faster with the iGPU. I am going to go with dedicated GPU due that would be a worse case scenario...Whatever the responsiveness is with a dedicated GPU it can only be better with an iGPU. It would be interesting to at least do a small sample to compare but it will depend on how long this testing really takes. I imagine this will take me a couple months to test and complete. So i have probably 6-9 months or so to develop a project plan since i have to wait for Kaby Lake and XPoint to do the actual testing.

As i told michal in a PM I'll post my project plan whenever i am at that point. I was just ants to see how fast those few programs took to load and i was just amazed my bad eyes actually could see it loading. There are only like 3 and 7 frames to load explorer and paint and i can actually see them with my naked eye....I was shocked. So there is definitely room for improvement in response times even from IBMs testing. They stopped testing at 300ms and i can tell a tangible difference from 130ms to 50ms so i would have loved to have seen them continue their testing down to 50ms.

Please note i am not actually doing a sample test to see if a user has increased productivity from 100ms to 20ms or anything like that. My goal is to see what aspects of a computer affect response times.

CPU, RAM latency, RAM bandwidth, SATA SSD vs XPoint, and so on.

I plan on cutting CPU speed in half and doubling RAM latency to see their effect on responsiveness. Thats the true goal of the project to see how each affect systems responsiveness and not to see how a user actually responds. I do not have the means to test that. My goal is to find out what people should care about in regards to building a balanced system and where future tech improvements/coding would show tangible benefits.

IBM already proved that the faster a system is the better and that the prior notion that the brain is thinking is patently false. Their testing clearly shows that the brain has this crazy short term memory and a users focus and attention is damaged with any type of delay. See the image above. It is impressive to see a users reaction time is improving even at 600ms to 300ms. It isn't surprising to be honest after seeing that explorer opens in a mere 50ms and paint takes 130ms and i can tell their is a difference so i can see how IBMs research is accurate.
-EDIT: Also note the biggest boost in a users responsiveness was going from 600ms to 300ms. There was a 25% reduction in time needed to complete the task!

Again i am just giving you a taste of my ideas and goals. I'll be making a separate thread with my project plan and full blown details once i actually make my final project plan. I just have the basics in my head and i still need to make the plan and account for all the variables.

But first I need to remove all of windows 7 BS so i can actually run my tests. I so also plan on making a few comparisons between the responsiveness of optimized GUI vs windows 7 bloated GUI so people can see the actual added delay caused by its unneeded transitions and such.

So back on topic...what other changes can i do to make windows as responsive as possible....as in unneeded bloated animations and stuff.

SomeGuy133 said:

Yea no....the animations are definitely a fixed time period...windows is very much more responsive since i turned it off. They are a fixed time animation without a doubt and make things have a delay to open no matter of system specs because its a fixed animation and not dynamic.

Click to expand...

As I mentioned in my post, things will pop in or out instantly, but that doesn't mean it slows down the speed of the task in any realistic usage.

Again, those old IBM studies are from a time when there was only a single thread of execution, running on a single core. The Windows desktop manager/compositing engine is handling the animations and display of windows (offloaded to the GPU via DX when Aero is enabled), but main/UI threads in each application themselves are responsible for changing information to be displayed and processing input.

You have some very incorrect assumptions about actual input latency, particularly in realistic usage situations.

pxc said:

As I mentioned in my post, things will pop in or out instantly, but that doesn't mean it slows down the speed of the task in any realistic usage.

Again, those old IBM studies are from a time when there was only a single thread of execution, running on a single core. The Windows desktop manager/compositing engine is handling the animations and display of windows (offloaded to the GPU via DX when Aero is enabled), but main/UI threads in each application themselves are responsible for changing information to be displayed and processing input.

You have some very incorrect assumptions about actual input latency, particularly in realistic usage situations.

Click to expand...

ok you are patently false about win 7 GUI. I just tested the difference between fade in and without fade in. It takes 50ms for explorer to load with no fade and 250ms with fade in enabled. Yea....fade animation adds no delay......

Also those IBM studies have nothing to do with single thread. It has to do with users attention span and how the brain works in regards to delays. Delays dramatically hurt a user response time. It would have been informative if they would have kept going to a response time of 100ms but they didn't. So unless someone wants to reproduce their study with system response times sub 100ms we won't know if faster responses actually help reduce user response time. Though given the fact that we are still seeing dramatic improvements with user response times at 300ms its likely that we will still see improvements with even more responsive systems.

By all means PROVE that 300ms is the absolute threshold to improving a users response time. If you wont prove it you have no grounds to argue otherwise. As far as IBMs research goes there appears to be a strong likely hood that 300ms is not the absolute maximum. There research showed no indication that 300ms is the maximum threshold.

Windows fade in animation take ~250ms and thats about about the fastest time IBM tested but thats not including the small delay when the mouse clicks the item and the delay between the animation. That 250ms is purely the animation of fading in. With fade in off it takes a mere 50ms to load the window plus the delay after clicking. That is a ridiculous amount of wasted time and distracting.

Additionally, there is no indication that 300ms response time is the absolute bottom threshold especially given the fact that 600ms to 300ms showed the largest reduction in user response time and it was the smallest change in system response time. It would have been very informative if they tried 50 or 100ms response time but sadly they didn't.

Again it is not my goal to prove 50ms response time reduces user response time...IBM already proved faster the system the better. My goal is to find what is actually limiting our current systems from being even snappier...maybe there is nothing. Though, I intend to answer that and to do so i need to remove windows BS animations and other things that add unneeded delay that has nothing to do with system performance. I just proved windows fade in adds a crap ton of delay. 50ms vs 250ms just to load "my computer"...thats quite large.

By all means somehow extrapolate out of your ass that 300ms is the fastest the system needs to be. Because by seeing the massive change from 600ms to 300ms there is no indication that it is going to stop there and that 300ms is rock bottom. Their research clearly showed 300ms reduction in system response time saved 3 full seconds. That was the largest change in user response time with the smallest actual change in system response times. If you know of another study that showed 300ms is rock bottom provide it please.

ok done editing at 1:34pm lawls

Just to verify the methodology:
How many hide/show cycles for each window?
How many windows?
Sizes of the windows?
Presence of other opened windows onscreen?
Contents of the folders? Have you tried with empty folders?
GL

Again I'll post my total methodology when i make my new thread thats dedicated to my project and it'll be details and full thought out.

When i just tested this for shits and grins i used a 60 FPS camera to see what is actually observed by the user and i went frame by frame.

I tried probably about 5-10 times and the difference were only about a single frame difference each time. I tried my computer, dropbox, folder with photos, and there did appear to be some cacheing with the photo folders but it was minimal difference since it was already super fast. my computer was a consistent 3 frames and the others as stated above appeared to be 80-90ms like 5 frames or so IIRC off my head. paint was 7 frames consistently which is around 120ms.

The windows fade in on my computer was 17 frames! thats about 250ms...i was shocked at how long the fade in was.

When i actually do this for real I will provide all methodology and raw footage and edited footage for anyone to view. Edited footage will just be removing excess from over run. Raw will be the exact footage with no cropping of passes.

I had nothing really open when i did these tests but when I do this for real i will have a 100% clean OS with only the basic programs needed so i won't have any monitoring programs or anything unless i deem them needed for analyzing how the system is reacting.

EDIT: also i will make sure there are no network drives, printers or other spare HDDs...those do add latency above whatever the base OS does.

Thank God I am old and could care less if it takes an extra billionth of a second to draw an effect

If your computer feels sluggish with the default Win7 settings, the cause is 80% of the time antivirus. It bogs down everything you do on the computer, literally.

Test with a clean install without antivirus, then with antivirus installed. The remaining 20% go to possible hardware/driver misconfigurations or network delays if your system uses a lot of network resources.

B00nie said:

If your computer feels sluggish with the default Win7 settings, the cause is 80% of the time antivirus. It bogs down everything you do on the computer, literally.

Test with a clean install without antivirus, then with antivirus installed. The remaining 20% go to possible hardware/driver misconfigurations or network delays if your system uses a lot of network resources.

Click to expand...

Topic has nothing to do with computer feeling sluggish but removing fixed animations as stated above with fade in and out.....so on topic

A good example of one is the windows start up logo. That is a fixed animation. IS there a way to remove it? I thought i read that somewhere. I'll have to go hunting.

off my head i cant think of anything else that appears to be fixed in windows or unneeded bloat besides a non windows program having some stupid transition UI. So is that controlled by windows or the program or does it depend how the original maker implemented it?

SomeGuy133 said:

Topic has nothing to do with computer feeling sluggish but removing fixed animations as stated above with fade in and out.....so on topic

A good example of one is the windows start up logo. That is a fixed animation. IS there a way to remove it? I thought i read that somewhere. I'll have to go hunting.

off my head i cant think of anything else that appears to be fixed in windows or unneeded bloat besides a non windows program having some stupid transition UI. So is that controlled by windows or the program or does it depend how the original maker implemented it?

Click to expand...

Ok, so you're not interested in real problems but trivial ones. You can remove the startup logo probably by replacing the corresponding .dll with an empty file (IIRC this used to work, not sure if it will break something in Win7). There's also an app that lets you modify the startup logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm3hSp7eSM4

I really can't see what you expect to achieve by removing tiny animations that are remaining after you set the performance tab options to 'max performance' which removes most eye candy. You should also disable aero desktop alltogether, that will speed up the GUI.

Yeah, disabling Aero would definitely be a very meaningful test but as the OP said it's for a project so I'm guessing he's listening. Also I am very interested about this because I used to play around with Compiz/Beryl on Linux based desktops and saw some 'patterns'. Like, the results of an animation of a given window would seem to get cached. Pre-rendering - like in Games.

B00nie said:

Ok, so you're not interested in real problems but trivial ones. You can remove the startup logo probably by replacing the corresponding .dll with an empty file (IIRC this used to work, not sure if it will break something in Win7). There's also an app that lets you modify the startup logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm3hSp7eSM4

I really can't see what you expect to achieve by removing tiny animations that are remaining after you set the performance tab options to 'max performance' which removes most eye candy. You should also disable aero desktop alltogether, that will speed up the GUI.

Click to expand...

aero desktop as far as i can tell does not have any fixed animations and actually provides some useful features like transparency, seeing actual objects as you move them, previews, and so on. It also seems pretty fluid.

The fade in and fade out is a good thing if implemented right! A smooth transition is a good thing as it helps keep abrupt changes from distracting the user but when that transition is 1/4 of a second that's far too long and is counter productive. IF the transition was 50-100ms it would actual be a nice feature. A 50ms transition on a 120hz screen is 6 frames and plenty to prevent a jarring change in contrast. (rapid changes in contrast can be as distracting or more then a delay depending on the case and user)

But again my goal here is to find out whats slowing down an OS if anything. This way when we design computers we can tell what parts are most important. I'll be testing the OS and some basic programs for responsiveness.

SomeGuy133 said:

aero desktop as far as i can tell does not have any fixed animations and actually provides some useful features like transparency, seeing actual objects as you move them, previews, and so on. It also seems pretty fluid.

Click to expand...

Aero desktop makes your desktop slow. If animations worry you, you should start by getting rid of aero.

B00nie said:

Aero desktop makes your desktop slow. If animations worry you, you should start by getting rid of aero.

Click to expand...

elaborate.....Your car is slow because the air filter is in it...remove it. I dont buy jack squat without proof/basis. You claim areo makes it slow,.,,,how? What does it do that makes it slow. I dont see any fixed animations in aero so if you know something i dont explain. Because i said so doesn't work.

SomeGuy133 said:

elaborate.....Your car is slow because the air filter is in it...remove it. I dont buy jack squat without proof/basis. You claim areo makes it slow,.,,,how? What does it do that makes it slow. I dont see any fixed animations in aero so if you know something i dont explain. Because i said so doesn't work.

Click to expand...

Aero has transitions and it uses ram and cpu. But since your attitude is like that and IMO you're in a hunt of futility.. meeh.

B00nie said:

Aero has transitions and it uses ram and cpu. But since your attitude is like that and IMO you're in a hunt of futility.. meeh.

Click to expand...

again elaborate. I haven't seen any transitions since i removed animations/fades and all the ones i listen in first page so if there are some please explain because i would like to know but your not providing details.

not sure how i have an attitude if i expect you to provide details and proof to support your assertion.

so meeh? /sarc


Again as i stated my goal here is to find what parts of a computer are limiting and aero provides some important productive features and i dont see a reason to disable it since it provides useful features. If you can provide an example as i have asked 3 times already on what it does in terms of fixed delays i would be very interested but you keep refusing to prove anything. So it calls into question your claims....since they are basely without an actual example.

okay hard forums new layout sucks giant ballz. I won't be updating this thread anymore because hard forum now sucks due to junk UI.