Windows Vista Tips and Tricks: Enabling Aero Glass without a Supported Graphics Card

Hi!!! Believe it or not, there's a way to cheat Vista into using many of the Aero glass effects even if you don't have a graphics card that supports the full Vista Aero theme. Try out this registry edit instead: 1. From the Start menu, type regedit and open the corresponding application. You'll need to provide administrative confirmation if User Account Control is turned on. 2. Now, navigate to this Registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft 3. From there, you need to create a new key and name it DWM. 4. In the DWM key, create a new DWORD value called EnableMachineCheck. 5. Set the EnableMachineCheck value to 0 (false). 6. Create another DWORD value, name it Blur, and set that value to 0 as well. 7. One more to go. Again in the DWM key you just made, create a DWORD value called Animations and set the value to 0 as well. All that's left now is to exit and reboot. The result is an Aero interface, but without the blurring effect that occurs when you're able to see "through" one window to whatever is behind it. Also, to lighten the load on your graphics card, the window animations such as the Mac-like (I went the whole without using the adjective; sorry it's Mac-like) "whooshing" of a window back down to the taskbar. Try this on a graphics card with 64MB of RAM. I think you'll be pleasantly suprised....