I try to get over to Giveawayoftheday.com on a daily basis to see whether anything nifty is on offer. I don't always make it, but it's usually worth the few minutes of time invested. Several months ago, the site offered the 1.9.5 version of the Aston Shell. I d/l'd and installed it and watched that "A" icon staring back at me every time I booted, defying me to run it. I was reluctant because some of the posters on the site stated or strongly implied that disastrous consequences would befall those who dared to run Aston--everything from stock prices plummeting to hard drives melting. I made a tentative inquiry at Wincustomize.com, but I didn't get much of a response, so I figured I'd just give it a shot.
I got up at 11:00 last night, after one of my wife and I's favorite shows, Dexter, went off and ran the shell. The first thing I noticed was that the start menu seemed to disappear and be replaced by a series of black bars. I suspected that this was due to Aston's dislike of WindowBlinds, so I restored the Windows XP theme and the start menu returned. The default theme has a lot of built-in functionality with drive meter, clock, left and right sidebar widgets, but the light blue color scheme was a bit bland.
I went to the website and sifted through the 500-odd themes available for download, most of which seem to have been created by the same group of about 10 people (evidently hardcore Aston enthusiasts). I downloaded about 15 themes, including some pretty cool-looking Simpsons, WarCraft III, and Vista-based works. Some of them worked well, but most of them are resolution-dependent and in most cases that resolution is 1024x768. I haven't really used this desktop resolution since I got an LCD monitor in September 2006. My monitor's native resolution is 1280x1024 and the themes designed for 1024x768 obviously look pretty distorted at this resolution.
After fiddling with the themes for a while and performing several switchbacks (the software has a "Shell Swapper" component that allows you to switch between the standard Windows Explorer shell and the Aston shell), I didn't discover any critical system issues resulting from the installation. On the other hand, it didn't perform exactly as advertised. When I moused-over (is that a word?) the "Programs" section of the start menu, Aston consistently generated a "Windows - No Disk" exception, which took several clicks to get rid of. A poorly-performing start menu is a bit of dealbreaker for me. Once when I clicked on the "AstonShell" shortcut from the "Web" dropdown menu, I got a strange error claiming that "http://www.astonshell.com/" could not be found. I tend to attribute that snafu to some incompatibility between Aston and Firefox's relatvely-new ability to restore a session after an improper shutdown. I can't honestly say that I've done a thorough evaluation of the software, as I was back in bed before 1:00, but a few glitches point to a not-quite-ready-for-prime-time piece of software. I didn't notice any real improvement in terms of performance over using the Explorer shell, but I probably didn't evaluate it long enough to accurately assess this.
I uninstalled the shell software but I was intrigued by the Aston2Menu product described on the website. I downloaded and ran it; it's currently in beta 3 pre-release status. Apparently, Gladiators decided to break out several of the AstonShell functions present in the 1.9.x versions into separate programs for the 2.0 release. The Menu software specifically skins and alters the functionality of the start menu. The beta includes several attractive skins, although some are cluttered with seemingly-superfluous widgets; more importantly, the menus are generally cleaner and easier-to-use than the standard menu. Aston intends to enhance the speed of navigation and create an editor when the release version is complete. While the menus override any standard start-menu skinning that a WB skin may do, beyond that it plays well with Stardock software. While ultimately I could get the same functionality that AstonShell offers by running some DX or Yahoo! widgets, I like the standalone Menu application. I would recommend that anyone looking for a good start-menu replacement give it a try.
