Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Aero effects on Vista Basic, Home Premium... Yes, Again

Yes, this particular procedure has been documented so many times, i'm amazed its not in the Bible, but i have done it and am aiming to de-geek it a bit, and cover a couple of bits most of the others don't have.
If you want the original more complex procedure, go to My Digital Life and check out his posts on the topic.
To start, go to Control Panel -> Personalisation (Make Sure you are in 'Classic View' on the left), then Colour Scheme. Make sure you don't have a Windows Vista Aero option in the list. Next, check in Window Colour and Appearance; if you get a dialog box, you don't have Aero.
Next, click Start, then 'Run', and type in 'regedit'. The REgistry Editor will start, and you need to use the tree on the left to go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM
The two keys present should be Composition and CompositionPolicy. If there not there, create new 32-bit keys with these names. Next, give Composition a value of 1, and CompositionPolicy a value of 2. Next go to Control Panel, scroll down to and start Services, find Desktop Window Management and click Restart the Service. You may also need to change this service from Disabled to Automatic.
If you think you're pretty handy with a computer, you can ignore the previous step and instead, go to Run, type in cmd, then enter net stop uxsms, wait a second, then enter net start uxsms (uxsms is the code for the DWM service).
At this point, you may have to restart your machine but that should've done it.
IF it hasn't:
That aside, now go back to Control Panel and select 'Services'. Check you are in Extended View (at the bottom) and look for Desktop Window Management. If it's there and it says Disabled, then change it to Automatic, and click Start the Service.
That usually only happens when you're on a domain, and i don't expect it to apply to many of you.
If it has worked:
You can now add some modifiers to change it a bit. The keys (32-bit DWORD's) are:
Blur
Just that, blur. Set to 1 if you want it, 0 if your machine can't handle it.
Glass
As above. nice effect
Animations
Nice animations for just about everything. 1 for on, 0 for off
AnimationsShiftKey
Great Fun! Only works if you hav Animations set to 1. Create your key called AnimationsShiftKey, set it to 1, then restart the service as mentioned above. Now if you hold down Shift whenever you click Minimise, Restore, Maximise, Close, when a dialog opens, anything with an animation, the animations will go super-slow as long as you keep Shift held down. It even slows down Flip 3D! (Windows-Tab for the uneducated)

Now if it doesn't work check around or give us a yell, because there is a million different things that can stop it from working.
P.S. Now when you choose Window Colour and Appearance in Control Panel->Personalisation you can select colours, intensities and enable transparency.
As for running DreamScene on non-Ultimate Computers, you can find a series of files and even a .bat installer, but make sure you backup, before you try, cos it often pops up nasty errors...

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