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Windows Vista Aero - The What and How to guide

What is the Vista Aero Experience? Does your PC have what it takes to support it? How do you enable it?

This is the intention of this article as we go through demystifying the details behind using the Aero features in Windows Vista.


First lets review the features that Aero has to offer.

Vista Aero enables the new a see through Glass look and feel in which the Start Menu, taskbar, and all onscreen windows and dialog boxes take on a new glass-like translucent sheen.

The Aero Glass effect provides a heightened sense of depth and a more professional looking user experience (something we have already seen in Linux Distro's and OSX as desktop effects).

With Aero, Windows Flip 3D creates a view of your open windows in a three-dimensional stack on your desktop. Use the Windows logo+TAB keys to cycle between these windows and find what you want.
To use Windows Flip, hold down the Alt key and tap the Tab key to cycle between all of the running applications and open windows.

Aero also enables dynamic window animations, so that when you minimize a window to the taskbar, it subtly animates to show you exactly where it went. Also Aero enables Live Taskbar Thumbnails, when you mouse over buttons in the taskbar, a small thumbnail preview will pop up, letting you see the window without having to actually activate it first
So what does it take to enable Aero?
First , the version of Vista that you need that supports Aero is either Vista Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate Edition. If you have other versions of Vista then they will not have Aero.

Windows Aero requires high system specifications in order to work, with the minimum requirements of at least 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor and 1 GB (gigabyte) of system memory.

Your video card must support DirectX 9.0 and up (preferably DirectX 10) with Pixel Shader 2 in hardware and be supported by a new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) driver. In addition, your video card must have must have enough dedicated memory (128 Meg of RAM is the minimum recommended) to drive your display for a particular screen resolution with Aero.

Use this chart as a starting point to guide you in determining the proper screen resolution.
64 MB video card - Uses less than 1280×1024 (fewer than 1,310,720 pixels) resolution
128 MB video card - Use 1280×1024 to 1920×1200 (1,310,720 to 2,304,000 pixels)
256 MB video card - You can use higher than 1920×1200 (more than 2,304,000 pixels)

Configuring Windows Vista Aero
Microsoft has nicely provided a handy configuration utility to Aero that enables you to fine-tune how it looks. This functionality is available via the Personalization section of the Control Panel. The quickest way to get there is to right-click a blank area of the desktop, choose Properties,
and then select Windows Color and Appearance from the Personalize appearance and sound effects control panel.
You can pick between preset color choices by selecting one of the color scheme swatches shown at the top of the window. You can also disable transparent glass (really translucency) or vary the intensity of the translucency to meet your liking.
Finally, you can expand the Show color mixer option and apply varying levels of color, saturation, and brightness to achieve just the look and feel you want.

If you are not able to access Aero you can try enabling it manually by doing the following:
  1. Click on the Start button and then click on “Control Panel”.
  2. Click on “Appearance and Personalization”.
  3. Click on “Personalization”.
  4. Click “Window Color and Appearance”.
  5. Click on “Open classic appearance properties for more color options”.
  6. Select the Windows Aero color scheme.
An alternative is to do a registry tweak to hack in and enable Aero through the backdoor
  1. Go to Start button, then click on Run.
  2. Run “regedit”.
  3. Browse and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM\ registry branch.
  4. On the following registry subkeys, edit and change the default value:

    Composition to 1
    CompositionPolicy to 2

  5. Exit registry editor.
  6. Go to Start and click on Run again.
  7. Execute and run the following commands one by one:

    net stop uxsms
    net start uxsms

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Written by PCWizKid on July 4th, 2008 with no comments.
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Windows Performance Increase - Virtual Memory

This tweak applies to Windows Vista or XP. If you are running many applications, especially large resource hogs that eat huge amount of memory, your system may become unstable or even crash.
You can increase the total amount of memory in your system with a simple virtual memory adjustment of the paging file on your system.

The paging file (Pagefile.sys) is a hidden file on your computer's hard disk that Windows XP uses as if it were random access memory (RAM). The paging file and physical memory make up virtual memory.

According to Microsoft Help and Support "By default, Windows stores the paging file on the boot partition (the partition that contains the operating system and its support files)"

The rule of thumb is to set the virtual memory page file to be 1.5x (times) the physical memory installed roughly. The intent here is to have enough virtual memory so you can multitask and handle opening more programs at once.

For example, if you have a PC with 2 Gigs of Ram, the the paging file size would be aprox 3 Gigs, giving you a total of roughly 5 Gigs.

Although your system my not use it all the key here is to set an adequate amount and limit the page file from growing further than it needs to be. This video tutorial takes you through the steps of quickly setting up this scenario.


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Written by PCWizKid on June 24th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on 1354 and 1426 and 1429 and 1673 and 169 and 2065 and 2157 and 401 and 544 and Contributors and Performance and Tips and Windows Vista and Xp and hacks and pagefile and pcwizkid and tweak and tweaks and virtual memory.

Windows Vista Hack - Unlock the Admin Account

PCWizKid's Tech Talk is proud to have been featured in the July 2008 issue of PC World Magazine. This article can be read in the "Here's How" section (page 115) of the magazine.

Although on Microsoft TechNet you will find a few toys and tweaks, the alternative to increasing performance still remains upto you. Meaning hack your way into config settings and manually set things up the way you want in the registry.Windows Vista Memory

Here are is a sought after hack for Windows Vista many dont know about. Be sure to make a System Restore Checkpoint to backup your settings before doing any of these tweaks.

Unlock the Administrator account

Turning on the Administrator account is straight forward. First, open an elevated command prompt by typing cmd into the Search box on the Start menu, right-clicking the command prompt icon that appears at the top of the Start menu, then selecting Run as administrator.

Then enter this command and press Enter:

Net user administrator /active:yes

From now on, the Administrator account will appear as an option on the Welcome screen, along with any user accounts you may have set up. Use it like any other account. Be aware that it won't have a password yet, so it's a good idea to set a password for it.

If you want to disable the account and hide it, enter this command at an elevated command prompt and press Enter:

Net user administrator /active:no

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Written by PCWizKid on June 17th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on 1354 and 1426 and 1429 and 1673 and 169 and 2065 and 2157 and 401 and 544 and Contributors and Microsoft Windows Vista and hacks and powertoys and tweaks.

Windows XP TIP - Rename the Recycle Bin

Try to rename the recycle bin in windows. You cant!

But wait, a simple registry tweak, and your all set to rename it to what ever you want!

Watch the tutorial which takes you through the steps.

Notes from video:
- Navigate in the registry to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/CLSID/ folder.
- Look for the folder within the brackets that is called {645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E} then expand it.
- Double-click Shellfolder.
- Change the binary value data from default 40 01 00 20 to 70 01 00 20

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Written by PCWizKid on June 9th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on 1426 and 1429 and 1673 and 169 and 2065 and 2157 and 401 and Contributors and hacks and pcwizkid and vista and windows tips.

Windows Tip - Change the default installation folder


Whenever you install something in Windows it defaults to C:\Program Files , you can change it in the registry so that it defaults to another drive or folder instead.

This tutorial shows you how to modify the default windows value to whatever you want.


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Written by PCWizKid on June 2nd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on 1426 and 1429 and 1673 and 169 and 2065 and 2157 and 401 and Contributors and Tips and hacks and registry and tweaks and windows.

New Free Vista PowerToy - TweakVI

There is a new tweaking Powertoy for Windows Vista users. Its called TweakVI. Best of all the basic version of this utility is completely free!

It seems once again a 3rd party has beat Microsoft to the punch by creating a PowerToy utility for Windows Vista only. Works on all Vista versions and on both 32bit and 64bit flavours.

The feature list of options and plug-ins to tweak is impressive such as IE and Firefox Tweaks, hacking the Start menu, putting an image on Internet Explorer's toolbar, changing how windows animate and optimizing your CPU's cache.

The tweaking utility allows you fine tune and optimize features to increase the speed of your Windows Vista system without going through a manual process like modifying the registry.
Here are some example screen shoots of options.






Free Download from the makers (TotalIdea.com).

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Written by PCWizKid on April 4th, 2008 with no comments.
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