inighthawki

I agree completely.

Noel, the reason was not about battery (I dont think they ever claimed that either). It was due to performance on low end tablet devices.

It doesn't automatically determine if Aero Glass is installed, you have to turn on the option "Enable Aero Glass" from the Menu Look tab. When that is on, it just skips the hack that converts the opacity from "glass" and "fullglass" to "alpha" and "fullalpha". So the Start menu renders glass like on Windows 7. Ah, awesome thanks. I was looking at the options under "Skin"

May I ask how ClassicShell 4 determines if bigmuscle's aero glass is installed?

Okay and for the picture bigmuscle ? How to disable this message? and.. the control box I found a way temporarily to close it.. if you have a suggestion to close it at each startup. It cannot be disabled, that is the point. He explicitly states that this is a beta/prototype build and not intended for normal use.

Wow, I didn't notice that before. We are left to wonder why Microsoft would put effort into making such a change. More of their gradual "weaning" away from allowing users to customize the UI at all? When does that ridiculousness end? When there's one and only one UI look and feel, I guess. Definitely goes against everything BigMuscle is doing. -Noel Yeah there couldn't possibly be a good reason, perhaps mathematical, to clamp a value to these numbers. Clearly they solely wanted to limit the user experience to 75% of the color intensity range for no reason.

People keep aying things like that, but Microsoft doesn't go and add stuff just to piss off 3rd party developers and try to disable circumventing of third party themes. What would they gain? The reason is almost certainly just a theming bug that isn't caught because Microsoft only ships a single theme. Since they do not officially support third party theme modding, they likely don't have any kind of tests that would ensure things like that work. More importantly, you have no proof to back up your claim, so why form these irrational justifications just so someone passing by on the forum sees it and then spreads it as a rumor, what does that solve?

No

Clearly Microsoft doesn't want this to work. In their twisted minds, they want to close off everything, so that you get what they give and nothing more. lol, are you for real? Do you think the people at Microsoft have some master plan to control how you use your OS or something? The "restrictive" stuff that they put in Windows is for the concern of security and nothing more. I hope you're not one of those conspiracy theorists who believe that everytime a windows update breaks some hack it's because Microsoft purposely put in some way to prevent it.

Release Preview Theme Is it? It appears to have the window frames of he RP theme yet the taskbar of the RTM theme...

I'm impressed, that was very quick work (buggy or not) . Nice job.

No, please read my post a couple up.

Just to clarify a few things about the text. The solid blocks of color you see is NOT the text glow. It is a DWM optimization to improve font rendering performance by no longer alpha blending the text with the frame. It is instead rendered into an opaque texture of the same color as the theme color. I personally don't like this idea because it reduces the personalization capabilities of users with modded themes, since the background color of the winow now must exactly match the color of the theme as a solid block of color to work. I have no doubt that bigmuscle will work around this and maybe render font differently though. The reason the "glass" window does not have this is because the ribbon UI renders its own non-client area. The text glow will also not work on the windows with the new text rendering (I cant say about the ribbon windows, though)

bigmuscles utility (as it stands) will not work on 8.1 at all, and has nothing to do with the high contrast. It is because unlike in Win8, 8.1 actually stripped out all references to the glass code. The blurring and utility functions to make it function are nonexistent.

Maybe, that is the cause: http://support.micro...b/2850674/en-us? Interesting. So some unlucky people might have their computer rendered unbootable by no fault of their own, and there is no fix? (except, of course, a backup image on a whole separate hard drive, which everyone has) Were there patched theme files in play here? If Microsoft updates components that touch any patched files, it may only be able to load digitally signed files (themes) and thus DWM will fail to properly initialize without theme data. It occurred with a windows update that happened a while back, I imagine it could theoretically happen again...

Actually, my advice is to take the time to shut it down and boot it up if you really don't have things that need the computer up all the time (such as backups that run late at night). But for professional computer use, there's no substitute for leaving it on and running. As I mentioned, not everyone is going to have problems, but those who really, really need computers to be rock solid reliable look to minimize risk factors. These are the kinds of folks who pay more for ECC, have redundant RAID arrays, do regular backups, etc. -Noel I think that is a fair point. For the average user though, I don't really see any advantage of shutting down versus sleep mode. Especially with the low power states available in modern CPUs with almost no power draw and nearly instant resume, the convenience becomes far more beneficial than any negligible improvement you'd get in reliability. I have put my computer to sleep every day for about 3 years, and it's still rock solid and reliable every day. The PC I had before that, same deal for a few years prior. Not an issue and still works to this day. I have a laptop which I used for almost 5 years without ever shutting off at all. Closest it got was reboots for updates. Everything else was sleep mode. Minus the battery being dead due to age, the laptop still works fine . So yes, for someone super hardcore that needs absolute guaranteed reliability. Then perhaps it makes sense. I don't know enough about what kind of wear and tear it would actually cause by shutting down, my area of expertise is not in hardware reliability or maintenence. I still believe that sleep mode poses far too many benefits that outweigh any potential gain you would get by leaving the PC running of shutting it down completely, though.

Well yes, that's part of it, and the fact that drivers made by who-knows-who and of unknown quality make up part of each and every operating system is why the general advice to avoid sleep, etc. is sound. Nobody said your system HAS to succumb to problems if you use it, but generally speaking people will have fewer problems if they don't. But the second part of the issue is very real, and you have it as much as anyone else. That is, heating/cooling cycles stress the hardware. I have 37 years experience in the computer industry; leaving hardware on and at a more or less constant temperature is FAR better for it than powering it down. -Noel I think you're overgeneralizing how bad drivers are from third parties. I would highly advise against your advise of just leaving your PC running all the time if the argument is about sleep or hibernate "not working properly." As for the heating/cooling thing, I've never encountered an issue with such a thing, and you have more industry experience than I do, so I'm sure you've seen it happen more, but I sincerely doubt that it's that big a deal for the majority of users. The difference in core temp jumps more when i start playing a game than it does when I go from normal usage to sleep mode (ambient room temperature). If this was really that big of an issue I think it would be a more widespread concern.

Huh? I put my computer in sleep mode every night. I have done so every night for probably the past several years. The only time I've shut it down is when it needs to get unplugged from the wall. Never had a single problem. I also had a laptop that I did the same. Since it was a laptop and had a battery I never turned it off at all, and used sleep mode for a few years. Never once had an issue. I think you're looking at some bad hardware or drivers if you can't handle low power states properly. Theres nothing wrong with Windows' sleep/hibernate modes.

Is their definition of "aero glass" simply transparency, or does the screenshot simply not show the blur? The transparency without blur is lame. Certainly better than the default theme, but meh... Why waste time with it.

I feel like at this point you should just write it in the popup itself. Append on something like: "Do not ask when this popup will be removed" or "Demo version popup will be removed in final release (1.0)" It's pretty annoying watching the same question be asked at least once or twice per page of this thread.

Plug in a keyboard and use his shortcut to disable loading glass on startup? Or if you force shutdown a couple times in a row during boot itll force it into repair mode. It should revert the dwm binaries.

If Bigmuscle does that though it might break in Windows 8.1 The existing version isn't going to work with 8.1 anyway. DWM will have undergone far more changes than control panel for starters...

EDIT: @bigmuscle, I know this has been mentioned before, but for the benefit of brand new users members here who only read the OP then DL the app, it would probably help head posts like this off to post this kind of info in bold, underlined text, preferably flashing if possible LOL, in the OP. I thought the info was already there, and it is implied, but it could be made clearer. Just my opinion. Or, easier: Woah, someone actually uses that feature?

It's not about doing it purposely. If Microsoft can make DWM more efficient by changing the way it works internally, they will, but with the risk that it breaks some random third party mod to hack in a feature that they removed. They won't do it purposely but I can bet you money they don't care if it breaks this.

If you actually have something to say, please use enough words so that others don't have to try to guess at what you mean, and while you're at it please delete the excessive quoting. Personally I have a suspicion that Microsoft is going to have done some things to Windows 8.1 that may break BigMuscle's approach, at least for a while, but we can hope it will be something that can be worked around. Their leadership doesn't seem to be wavering on its course toward the rocks. I don't know how it is that some people get to define such obviously wrong directions and have big companies stick with them for years, seeming without anyone noticing that they're about to trash the whole company. -Noel Thing is in Win8, glass wasn't really "removed." There were only bits and pieces of code removed or changed to disable it. BigMuscle did an excellent job hooking into a lot of this. But this was done last minute at a time where Microsoft wouldn't have had time to fully remove it and test it long enough to ensure it didn't break anything. In 8.1 there's no doubt that they've removed more code to help optimize things further, and BigMuscle's solution will NOT work for a while. It will most likely require some pretty large changes to re-implement a lot of the features that he's counting on right now for it to work. Seeing how skilled he is, I have confidence that he could get something working, but it will be tough.