A reader wrote in yesterday asking why she no longer had the “pretty” glass windows, and how to get them back. It occurred to me that there might be other people with the same issue, so I’m writing up the (fairly simple) instructions for others that might have the same question.
Why Does Aero Turn Off?
If your desktop has suddenly flashed and then reverted to Vista Basic, it’s probably because of one of these reasons:
- You are running an application that isn’t compatible with Aero, or the compatibility options are set to disable Aero for an application.
- You’ve opened too many programs and run your computer out of memory.
- You’ve changed the “Performance Options” to “Adjust for best performance” under the Advanced system properties, which disabled desktop composition.
- You’ve disabled the Desktop Window Manager service.
- Your video card can’t handle the resolution.
When Windows Vista detects that your computer is running too slowly for Aero, it will automatically disable it. Normally once you close out of some applications everything goes back to normal, but sometimes you get “stuck” with the Vista Basic theme, and have to go in and enable it again.
Re-Enable Aero Theme
Right-click on the desktop and choose Personalize, then click on the link for “Window Color and Appearance”
Make sure that Windows Aero is selected in the list, and then hit the Apply button.
This should re-enable Aero:
If that doesn’t enable Aero, type sysdm.cpl into the start menu search/run box, choose the Advanced tab and then the Settings button under Performance:
Make sure that at least “Enable desktop composition” and “Enable transparent glass” are selected (Or just choose Best Appearance), and then go back into the desktop properties and choose the Windows Aero theme again (although you really shouldn’t have to do this step)
If that still doesn’t work, close out of all your open applications, and verify that the Desktop Window Manager service is running in Services under Control Panel:
At this point, you should hopefully be able to re-enable Aero. If not, drop a post on our forum =)
Let me start by saying that I have no idea why anybody would want to do this, and it’s perhaps one of the most useless articles I’ve ever written. That said, if you’ve ever wondered how to remove the username from the Start menu in Windows XP, this article is for you.
I’ve got a Wacom drawing tablet hooked up to my computer, and ever since I installed Vista’s Tablet PC utilities, I’ve had this obnoxious onscreen keyboard on the welcome screen that just can’t seem to be turned off through any regular settings. So how do I get rid of it?
If you use Outlook and you’ve noticed it being excessively slow or just having errors, you should probably scan and repair your Personal Folders file for any problems. It’s sorta like checkdisk for your email.
In the pursuit for performance, making sure your drive isn’t fragmented is a regular task. The problem is that Windows XP doesn’t allow certain system files to be defragmented without commercial software. What about free solutions?
If you open up a lot of PuTTY windows just to keep connections open, you might be interested in an updated version that supports minimizing to the system tray. I find this very useful for opening tunnels that I wouldn’t otherwise need to interact with on the desktop.
As regular readers know well, I’m a huge fan of using AutoHotkey to automate my entire computing experience… but in Windows 7 and Vista there’s a serious limitation since you can’t run a script as Administrator by default. This means that your hotkeys can’t interact with windows running in Admin
If you can’t figure out how to turn on the Details or Preview panes in Windows Vista Explorer, you aren’t alone. This question popped up on the forum the other day, so I decided to write up the answer for everybody’s benefit.
I have decided that J River’s Media Jukebox is now my music player of choice. I did an initial review in a previous post. Now let’s cover the various features included in this application. Today I will cover how to rip you CD’s into your favorite format.
I was browsing our forum earlier today when I noticed a question from a reader asking how to select a date range when searching for files in advanced search. This is something that was extremely easy in XP, but seems to be much less intuitive in Vista.
In the Customize View window click on Fields.
