Seamlessly "autorunning" front-ends?

[Pherret]

I myself would like to personaly kick-off the new htpc forum with a bit of a more advenced question than "What is an HTPC?"

I am using myhtpc. I get it to "autorun" by placing it in the startup portion of win98. This, however, waits to load windows, watching it load the desktop and icons, then it runs myhtpc. It all makes it look a bit disjointed as an htpc.

I was wondering if there is any way to make it a little more seamless?

I don't care if it loads windows, I could always change the loading screen if I felt up to it.

The only problem I see is that it doesn't look like myhtpc was designed for this kind of use. I haven't found a shutdown command or other integral options to run more "by itself". I still rely on standard windows to do those things.

 

[BDS250]

There are a few ways to make it load into myHTPC with out the look of the desktop comming up first.

The simplest would be to turn off all of the icons on the desktop and have the background for myHTPC set as your wall paper.

Another solution is to have myHTPC replace explorer.exe as the windows shell. Do a search on the myHTPC forum and there is lots of info there on how to do this.

I personally have just turned off all of the icons and hid the taskbar that way when it starts it looks very slick and integrated.

 

[Warriorprophet]

Just replace the shell with myhtpc, I think on win98 all you hafta do is edit boot.ini or system.ini

Can't remember, been awhile.

But yah, it'll work, theres also shell switchers for win98 that'll do a boot menu with like a timer to go into default if you want and easy way to goto explorer when you need to.