Archive for the 'Aero' Category
What is the Desktop Windows Manager (DWM)?
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007One of Windows Vista’s most touted features is its new Aero (formerly Aero Glass) graphical scheme, which gives transparent, frosted edges to screen windows, taskbar thumbnails, and task-switch thumbnails. (Aero also enables the new Flip 3D task switcher.) But how do these features actually work? The new DWM runs as a service: The Desktop Windows [...]
Vista Aero: What a CPU Hog!
Friday, March 23rd, 2007Microsoft’s new Aero Glass GUI - one of the cornerstones of the company’s Windows Vista marketing message - is a joy to behold. Aero’s sleek, semi-transparent facades serve to enhance the user experience by providng a stronger sense of "depth" and cohesion. Combined with Vista’s enhanced UI metaphors (love those "breadcrumbs" in explorer), Aero is [...]
How to Enable Windows Vista Aero After Clean Vista Install
Saturday, February 3rd, 2007Those of you out there who bought a copy of Windows Vista that offers the Aero interface last night or today will want to watch for something if you plan on doing a clean install (which you should). I was doing a clean install of Vista Business last night and noticed that Vista assumes your [...]
Transparent Windows And Added Security: New Twists In Windows Vista
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007Windows are best kept transparent, Microsoft appears to have decided. This is one of the most obvious new twists to the freshly released Windows Vista operating system. But the [more] software also has lots of other snazzy surprises in store for users. While hardly a revolution, users can look forward to a collection of more-or-less [...]
Enable Vista Glass on Intel GMA 950 Graphics Cards
Saturday, January 6th, 2007Currently Windows Vista does not have WDDM support for the Intel GMA950 integrated graphics card. Even though this card is integrated, it supports all of the requirements for Vista Glass. It is just a matter of getting a driver that is compatible with it and vista. After doing a ton of research, I found that [...]
Vista is Fast If You Have the Hardware
Saturday, December 30th, 2006With Microsoft’s Windows Vista finally released to manufacturers and on the verge of making its way to retail, we can at last get down to the business of examining precisely how well the new OS performs. In our first tests, we discovered that while Vista’s hardware requirements may be steep, it should run just fine–even [...]
Windows Vista Rules for Enabling Windows Aero
Friday, December 22nd, 2006Windows Vista is the first Microsoft Windows operating system that provides a range of user experiences that gracefully scale based on a system’s hardware capabilities while still giving the user full control over configuration options.
All computers that meet the Windows Vista minimum supported hardware requirements will run the Windows Vista Basic user experience. Computer systems [...]
Re-Enabling Windows Aero
Thursday, December 14th, 2006Windows Vista has a sweet little new interface called Windows Aero, call it another theme for windows. The problem is that this does not work on every pc configuration, it only works on system that windows finds fit for it to be used on.
Follow these steps and you will be able to re-enable Aero even [...]
Run Vista Aero Glass Without AGP and PCI-express slots
Thursday, November 16th, 2006While most desktop systems nowadays have either "PCI Express" or AGP slots available for video cards, what about those users with motherboards a couple years old, with might have a fairly decent processor and bus speed but lack PCIe or AGP slots?.
You don’t need to be running an ancient Pentium III to have a PCI-only [...]
A Windows Vista with XGL Desktop Instead of Aero?
Thursday, November 9th, 2006What exactly is Microsoft wining from its partnership (and possible future acquisition) with Novell?
Everybody knows today that the little Penguin just got a big hug from the big daddy, Microsoft. Novell was the lucky company to make its Linux distro available for interoperability with Windows, and to me, that was not a surprise. Actually, of [...]
