Hi,

I am running Vista Home basic, and have been for a year on this PC.

The Display of the Windows has up until now been the Vista one (see through Windows - ability to change colours etc) but now it's gone to look like XP used to. I have tried the "Display settigs" from Right click, but the display seems to be on "Vista Basic". How di I get it back to what it used to be like.

I know there are people who will say, it takes up memory - use the basic" but I happen to like the appearance of how it was.

Thanx

Are you sure you're running Vista Home Basic because you appear to have been using the Aero feature that isn't supported by Basic and which requires Premium?

Hi Mike,

No, sorry for the confusion - The PC is 12 months old, I am Supposed to be running Home Premium, and the PC is loaded with Home Premium (Control Panel\System), and has been behaving like a Home Premium PC for the 12 months, however the PC was from very recently (2 days ago) behaving like a Home Basic PC (in that I'd lost the ability to have aero, and the <Control Panel\Personalization\Window Colour and appearance> had changed from the 8 coloured boxes allowing use of the colour mixer, to the old type Windows Standard (XP) type.

I have managed to retrieve it using System Restore, but thats the only way I could find, but I'd like to know WHY it reverted to a Home Basic type setting.

I cannot suggest a reason as to why it should have changed and it could be almost impossible to track down the reason, unless you do something specific again which causes the problem to reoccur. The main thing is that you're back to where you should be with it.

From another forum:

Quote:

Some programs revert Aero to Basic. In my case it is Logictech Harmony Remote V5. If I close it my PC reverts back to Aero.

Quote:

Check to make sure you are still in 32 bit color. If for some reason your system has changed to 16 bit you will lose AERO.

Quote:

I noticed that, while I was playing the Sims 2, I was unable to adjust my edge smoothness... so I figured it had to be that I did something wrong the last time I configured the nVidia controls. Well, after messing around again, and then running the expirenece index, it seemed to start working again...

Quote:

Uninstall Symantec pcAnywhere V12.1, which is supposedly Vista Certified. As soon as I did that and rebooted, I got Aero back. I found this to be the culprit by doing a search for the word "mirror" in the registry, and found that pcAnywhere was loading a Mirror Driver.

Conclusion - it's most likely to have been a program installed on your PC that did it.

_________________
I realised I was dyslexic when I went to a toga party dressed as a goat.

That follows, I did install a program just before this happened, and the System restore took it back to before I installed the program, hence it came back OK.

I'll give it one more go, and if it still does the revert, I'll put the program on my XP computer!

Oh lovely Vista!

Please remember that system restore does not 100% remove a program that was installed.
It only removes "most" of the references to it.

So you may want to look at removing the program also to get rid of any bits left lying around.

NP and good luck.

Update:

The scenario as follows:

I reinstalled the program - it installed, but gave me a message:



and this gave me the following when trying to change the colour scheme:



Apparantly, once the program is not running, Windows Vista will reset itself to Aero again - it didn't even with a restart.

So that program is consigned to run on my XP Machine!

I removed the program (Complete uninstall this time OF! ) and did a restore. (No tace of it in Prog files) Aero is back working.

Thanks to all (except Vista)

David

Oh well at least you know 100% that was the root of the problem and will possibly save you time, trouble and effort trying it again at a later date.
(Unless you can put-up with the colour change that is)

One of my programs when in use gives me that same error message (sorry can't remember right now which app it is), but after I have finished with the program it must set itself back again, maybe after a reboot not sure when it resets, but when I check its always back on aero.

Hi Anne,

I didn't really experiment re. the reboot. All I noticed was the scheme had changed, it probably DIDN'T reset on a reboot though, as I think it was a couple of days after I loaded the program that I noticed the change.

However, I might try it again when I'm feeling bored!

It works OK on XP

Dave