Hi everyone,
I am currently running Windows vista on my Toshiba Satalite Notebook. My Notebook is about 2 years old now (late 2004 model) and the glass effects on Microsoft Windows Vista will not work. My laptop specs are:
Mobile Intel Pentium CPU 2.80 GHz (Which is actualy a very good processor)
640MB System Usable RAM (With Actualy 756MB installed)
40GB Hard Drive with a 100GB USB Hard Drive
ATI Mobility Radeon 7000 IGP (with 128MB of on board Memory)

My specs are actualy not that bad and the computer is still very good with graphics, very fast, and very responsive. But it is not good enough for Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2 (public release). In the performance rating system that comes with vista it gives my Graphic's card a rating of 2, and the Glass effects need a rating of 3 for the options to become available.

What i am wondering is if anyone else has come to a solution to this problem by finding away to give there Graphics card a better rating, disabling the raiting system, or a hack that tricks the computer into thinking the graphic card is a raiting of 3. If you know of anyways please tell me or refer me to someone or a sorce.
Thank you,
illdevilinc

P.S. The build number is 5384

About windows vista... I cant wait! Its going to increase the performance of my computer because I am a gamer. Suposidly its going to do many things from enhancing graphics to smoothing performace when playing games. I for one cant wait until it comes out because with it's launch comes directx 10! This is also going to increase gaming performance and also going to help computers in general.

I have the same Windows Vista build as you and the first thing I noticed after I installed it was the high amount of RAM usage. If you run Vista with all 3D/glass/animation effects turned on, you can expect a 400-700 MB of your RAM to be used, leaving you with a little amount of memory for the rest of the applications. For the total amount of RAM you have installed on your system, you would have some trouble running Vista with all the effects on and working at the same time, unless you turn off the effects, or have at least 1GB of RAM (recommended) to be able to work freely and at the same time enjoying the 'eye-candy' of the new Vista environment.

But if you are aware of all the RAM-related issues, let's focus on your question. In relation to your graphics card rating, I don't see any solution to bypass that rating and forcing windows to think that it should be a '3'. By the way, have you tried overclocking? Maybe if you overclocke your card the system would considerate some more rating points to your overall graphics rating and you could get a rating of 3. If for some reason you can't overclock your graphics card or you don't know how to do it, then right now I don't see other solution.

I heard that all you need to be able to enable the aero interface is a shader model 2.0 and directX9 compatible graphics card, so be sure to check those before you do anything else (assuming you didn't know already).

The reason you cannot get the glass effects is because you do not have enough ram. You need atleast 1 gig of ram to run them which is why it wont work for you. If you are desparate of getting it working, you can try to increae the size of the virtual memory and see if that helps.

Don't count your chickens. With all the fancy effects all it's going to do is make your computer slug - and make it much much slower that it really can be. All that fanciness is mainly in explorer, and already when I kill explorer in XP I find dramatic increases in speed when playing games. I doubt vista will improve graphics when it eats so much.

Imagine the pre built PC market - because vista eats so much resource all computers are going to have to increase their power, not a single one will be in the $300 range becuase vista not only needs much more powerful hardware, but will cost around $450. I predict manufacturers will shift to linux, BSD, or eComStation this time around because of vista's requirements and price to the end user. KDE and Fluxbox can run with fancy effects with only 256 MB of ram and less space than vista - installation discs for FreeBSD only have 2 CDs(around 1.4 GB with tons of software that you choose to install - including 2 full desktop environments, word processors, source code, browsers, HTTP servers, package managers, etc.) while Vista needs 1 DVD for not even half of the value of FreeBSD(Word is sold seperately, One browser, one desktop encironment, no HTTP server, just some basic applications that you'll probably never use).

Also, many programmers do not like DirectX. Not only is OpenGL a standard, portable graphics lib, but people say it performs better than DirectX.

This post has been edited by Tetraca: Jun 22 2006, 06:03 PM

I don't know whether it will increase your PC's performance, because Vista itself requires twice as much hardware power than Windows XP. All of that extra power is for the Aero interface and such; sevral of the new features are nowhere near essential for using Windows (that's not stopping me from using it ). I'm also sure that DirectX 10 will be available as a download for Windows XP, so there ain't that many reasons o upgrade to Vista (unless you like havingthe latest and greatest running on your system).

No, the reason i can not get the effects is because of my graphic card rating. Windows Vista now operates its controls based on your system rating. If you do not qualify for the rating then it will disable all hopes of glass effects. The RAM does have an impact on performance but not how Windoes Vista chooses you graphic options.


Windows Vista will not be a very good gaming system as i can see it. It will make your computer slow and graphics and games take a long time to load. Also with the build of Vista i have every time something happens (say you save something) it asks for confermation up to 3 times before it will let you do it. And after this time your game will most likly crash as that is what is happening to my applications. But, this compleatly depends on your hardware, if you have good hardware and lots of RAM then your applications and games could work perfectly. There is no way to tell the performance of your computer with Vista until you install it.

From what i hear this will be the shittest yet! requiring a wooping 15GB after installation..... and linux can do everything it can do and more only using 1.7GB of space....