The Dallemagnes → May, 2008

Flip 3D and Aero On Vista Home Basic

For those users who purchased Windows Vista Basic, you’ll notice your missing two of the interfaces available in the other versions of vista. Flip 3D and the Aero Interface. On systems whose graphics capabilities are able to handle such things you may be wondering if there is a way to get these effects without paying the extra cash to upgrade to a different vista version. Good News there is! To get that flip 3D effect users have serveral options available to them.

For $20.00 Top Desk offers the Flip 3D effect as well as the Expose effect found in the mac systems. Better News yet there is also a free utility available to those of you on a tight budget called Shock Aero 3D and for xp users only you may wish to give WinFlip a try.

The following registry hack allows Vista Basic Users to enable Aero on their system (NOTE:BE SURE TO BACK UP YOUR REGISTRY BEFORE PROCEEDING!)

Click Start and type Regedit in the search bar, open the registry editor and navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/DWM/

Make the values of the following to keys as such:

Composition = 1

CompositionPolicy = 2

then Right click on Command Prompt and run as admin and enter the following commands:

net stop uxsms

net start uxsms

Reboot Your System to see the changes

There is also a program called TrueTransparency that changes the windows border adding png support and so true transparency.

Another option available to users is Stardocks Windowblinds, there are many skins for it which use the transparency effect. Windowblinds however is shareware.