Microsoft decided that The Aero interface would not be available for Windows Vista Home Basic users. I personally dislike the new trend to offer several versions of a program with different functionality naming them basic, premium and ultimate. It confuses consumers who have enough troubles to work with the operating system less alone deciding which of the many versions of Windows Vista would suit their needs.

It is apparently not a big problem to enable the Vista Aero interface in Windows Vista Home Basic even though it is officially not included in that version. All you need to do is to change the values of two registry keys and restart Windows Vista afterwards. Open the registry by pressing Windows + R, typing regedit and hitting enter afterwards.

Navigate to the key Hkey_Current_User \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ DWM \ and change the value of the entry Composition to 1 and the value of CompositionPolicy to 0.

Now you can select the Aero interface by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting Personalize from the menu. Switch to Colors and Appearance and click on Classic Appearance Properties.. and choose Windows Vista Aero from the menu.

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Mike

I believe Aero is not included in HB by default because apparently it's one of the goodies you pay extra money for.

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Mike

Michael, did you get your tip verbatim from this article, or did you write another artical five or more months ago and this guy copied you?

http://www.ghacks.net/2007/05/.....ome-basic/

That wasn't really my point. If you're gonna copy and paste an entire article from somewhere else you could at least credit the original poster.

@Antman:

You are right... I didn't realize it was a direct copy/paste job. That's definitely not cool.

Guess I should check before replying...