Paige purchased a new Dell desktop probably about 6 months ago, it came with Windows Vista Home Premium and she upgraded to an ATI Radeon graphics card with 256 MB RAM. I helped with the initial set up, mostly to de-crappify the machine, and one thing that has never worked from day one is the fancy Aero Glass theme. If you went to rate the machine, the process would crash. She was stuck with the crappy Vista Basic theme. Why would Dell sell a machine, that out of the box, would not work as advertised? Last night I was sitting at her machine and I decided to update the ATI driver. A new driver was released in March of this year. After installing that I was able to rate the machine, which rated at 3.8, high enough to handle Aero Glass. I restarted the desktop window manager and she now had the Aero Glass theme running. It’s not the greatest theme in the world, and I really don’t understand why you need a powerful machine to run it, but at least now she had it working on her Dell.

Tags: vista, microsoft