Windows Vista Aero =LINK=

On Windows Vista and Windows 7 computers that meet certain hardware and software requirements, the Windows Aero theme is used by default, primarily incorporating various animation and transparency effects into the desktop using hardware acceleration and the Desktop Window Manager (DWM). In the "Personalize" section added to Control Panel of Windows Vista, users can customize the "glass" effects to either be opaque or transparent, and change the color it is tinted. Enabling Windows Aero also enables other new features, including an enhanced Alt-Tab menu and taskbar thumbnails with live previews of windows, and "Flip 3D", a window switching mechanism which cascades windows with a 3D effect.

Windows Vista Aero

Windows 7 features refinements in Windows Aero, including larger window buttons by default (minimize, maximize, close and query), revised taskbar thumbnails, the ability to manipulate windows by dragging them to the top or sides of the screen (to the side to make it fill half the screen, and to the top to maximize), the ability to hide all windows by hovering the Show Desktop button on the taskbar, and the ability to minimize all other windows by shaking one.

One of Vista's most noticeable and memorable additions was the "Aero" design, which used Direct3D to draw translucent, glassy windows that could fade gracefully in and out of view, replacing the 2D windows from older Windows versions. Over the weekend, Twitter user @thebookisclosed (who makes a habit of digging deep into old development versions of Windows) gave us a look at the earliest known version of Aero in a Longhorn development build from March of 2003, nearly four years before Vista would be released to the public.

Windows Aero is a Windows graphical theme that was introduced in Windows Vista. It creates translucent windows and adds effects to minimizing and maximizing. Windows Aero is usually enabled by default, but if it wasn't you can quickly enable it with just a few clicks. If you find that Aero is causing performance problems, you can disable some or all of the effects.

There's one caveat to this though - there's another StackOverflow thread ( -framework-4-0-and-drawing-on-aero-glass-issue/4656182#4656182) which is describing an issue with the DWM API DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea method, so if I were you, I'd read through that before trying this solution.

Ok, system hooks are the direct approach for getting information on changed window positions and Jelle's proposal with transparent form is very good. But you can use a less invasive method to get information on Desktop windows by using user32.dll

Ok, well I noticed today that my aero system was no longer working (am left with the default solid pastel blues... yuk) I am not sure when it happened as it only dawned on me when I was calibrating my screen but it cant have been more than a few days.

After that I have no clue... The Aero themes are available to me, the background changes but the glass effects and color themes of the start bars and windows still stays the same, i.e. default solide pastel blues.

"Note: If you have Windows 7 Starter, or if your system doesn't meet the requirements for Aero you won't be able to use Aero.Windows 7 Aero Minimum Hardware Requirements: -7-aero-minimum-hardware-requirements"

I sorry if i barged into this post here (i am new to this and not familiar with the rules for something like this) but i am having the same problem. I figured it would be better to just add to this question instead of asking a whole new one. I got a BSOD and my laptop restarted after which my aero system wasn't working.

The thing is i ran the troubleshooter and it said "Aero effects not supported on this Windows Edition". The common features my problem shares withLuc82's problem are that i can select aero theme and the check boxes for aero options are not present.

Start the system restore and set the restore point to the time instance when your aero theme was working perfectly. After 10-15 minutes or so, your system will be restored to the previous state with all the driver settings rolled back. Believe me, I faced exactly the same problem and none of the solutions given here worked but this one.

And my laptop is stuck at windows basic theme it is not getting out of it. Few days back I typed on internet windows 8 themes for windows 7 and it gave me some system files in C:/ProgramData/System36. I replaced them and that where the problem began. I shut down the laptop but next day when i booted it i found that the interface of fully activated windows 7 ultimate has became interface of windows 2000.

Windows Aero is a new feature of Windows Vista that is getting a lot of attention. It is a collection of visual enhancements designed to make your computing experience more enjoyable and visually stimulating and make it easier to navigate among many different applications and windows.

I also demand Vista Aero Transparent Glass on this laptop. So what that it has a crappy NVidia Fx5200 GX video card with 32megs of RAM? That was state of the art three years ago. Runs (some) 3D games just fine thank you, and Google Earth, too. Surely this POS can run some transparent windows, right? I mean, it did under XP running Windows Blinds. ;) (Yes, I know how the new desktop compositor works under Vista, no letters, please.)

heyy..plz help.!!i have 2 GB ramno graphics card, :(256 MB ram shared for video memory..i want aero..just the non-glassy version without all the features...could i have it..i have windows vista ultimate !!

Aero Glass is much more complex than it may appear. A color tint, blurring the screen area behind the window, and fixed images are combined to create the glass effect. However, there is very little visual differentiation between the active (frontmost) window and other windows that may be positioned alongside it, leading to the risk of a user accidentally closing the wrong window. The main indicator of the active window was that its Close button was bright red, while it is the same color as the surrounding area in all other windows.

Aero Shake, available only in Windows 7, minimizes all other windows when a single window is dragged quickly back and forth across the desktop. Performing the gesture again restores the hidden windows.

A software in my comp switched the theme to vista basic. Now i want to turn it back to aero but i cannot find the themei searched everywhere,themes,personalization etc... so how can i turn on the aero theme back on..

it so happened that my laptop was not shut down and had gone into hibernation and when i returned and resumed the windows to my surprise the theme was set back to aero and i could access the transparency settings also....well right now i'm really not into finding it out again but if any one of you can figure this thing out it would be great....I Guess this might be a bug related to hibernation..

Why Aero Has Gone Horribly WrongThis one I find especially annoying. Aero, the slick, shiny new user interface for Vista, should run more reliably than the Vista Basic UI and Windows XP. Aside from looking cooler (scalable interface elements, translucency, shiny things, flying windows), the whole point of Aero was supposed to be that most of the display processing took place on the GPU, the brain on your video card, instead of your CPU. UI elements still have to be calculated to some extent on the CPU, but you place the processor-intensive elements of animation and translucency on the GPU. This should mean that UI operations interfere less with CPU operations, like producing music. It should mean fewer glitches. It should not require a high-end graphics card. Three-dimensional transformations, translucent texture blends, and even animations can all be performed by shader code on the graphics card without even involving the CPU. This was even running on mainstream Mac hardware before the release of Windows XP.

Both the main window and the child windows can have menus, but the menu of a child window is shown on the same bar with the menu of the main window. As long as a child window exists the menu of that document is shown. When no child window exists the menu of the main window is shown. Both on the same bar.

As with Windows 8, ALT + TAB will show you desktop apps and Windows Store apps. Thankfully, in Windows 10, Store apps are inside windows and can be used like desktop apps, rather than going to full screen and being really annoying.

However, to show all the windows that are active for another desktop, you have to press the SPACEBAR key. Then you can press TAB again to get back to the top part of the screen and arrow around to which app you want to select. Then press Enter and you will load that app from that desktop.

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Because Apple has had four "major" OS X revisions to fine tune the UI, the OS X Finder is cleaner looking and better implemented than is Aero in Vista Beta 1. For example, while Apple has subtly fixed problems with the display from underlying windows bleeding through to the windows above them (Figure), Microsoft is clearly suffering from some growing pains. In Vista Beta 1, underlying windows can often cause a muddy-looking display that is distracting and sometimes even ugly (Figure).

Both Tiger and Vista Beta 1 offer various animations in the shell. For example, Tiger includes a "genie" effect when you minimize windows and a "poof of smoke" when you delete an icon from the Dock. These animations are visually attractive, but they're not just eye candy. Instead, the point of these animations is to provide visual feedback to the user that something has happened. When you minimize a window, the genie effect shows you "where" the minimized window went so you can more easily find it later. Vista Beta 1 offers similar animations. When you animate a window, it visually appears to minimize to the appropriate taskbar button. 350c69d7ab