My Aero Glass Is Temporarily Half-Empty!

February 4, 2007 7:48 AM

So I've upgraded to Vista, for better or for worse. I've got a Toshiba Satellite A105-S361, though, and the "hot, new" Aero Glass feature isn't working. Am I wasting my time trying to enable this and/or is my computer even capable of rendering Aero? I've checked everywhere, to no avail.
posted by chaosscontrol to computers & internet (7 comments total)

It has an intel video card and shared video ram? I doubt Aero Glass will work on it then.
posted by furtive at 7:57 AM on February 4, 2007

Check your "windows experience" score by going to control panel -> system & maintenance. It should tell you if your graphics card has the capability to run Aero Glass.
posted by wearyaswater at 8:06 AM on February 4, 2007

I looked at the specs, and that model does, in fact, use an integrated video chipset. These are not optimized for 3D video at all despite their impressive-sounding names.

Unfortunately, that means that your laptop will NOT run the Aero Glass experience that you're hoping for. Even if you got drivers that would allow it, you would not be happy with the performance.
posted by Merdryn at 8:10 AM on February 4, 2007

an integrated video chipset. These are not optimized for 3D video at all

That's not really true -- the Intel GMA series does have hardware 3D acceleration, it's just that the performance is not so hot compared to a separate video card. For instance, the GMA 900 clocks in about half the performance of a GeForce 6200.

According to Intel, the 945G/GM Express and 965 Express chipsets will support the Aero interface. So chaosscontrol is out of luck with that particular laptop, but it's not accurate to say that no Intel integrated video chipset will run Aero.
posted by chrismear at 8:37 AM on February 4, 2007

In case it's literally just a issue of turning it on, check the following.

Right Click on Desktop -> Personalize -> Theme.

Select Windows Aero, not Windows Basic.

To recover some performance afterwards you can turn off the transparency effects under "Windows Color and Appearance"
posted by tiamat at 11:56 AM on February 4, 2007

In the future, problems like this can be avoided with the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. It tells you before you get Vista, what will and won't work.

There was one for XP as well.
posted by IndigoRain at 1:44 PM on February 4, 2007

You also won't be able to use Aero if you have the Vista Home Basic version, because they disabled it in that version to entice users to get the more expensive versions (presumably.) The other 5 versions include it, though.
posted by Rhomboid at 2:04 PM on February 4, 2007