What exactly does Aero do?

(Topic) This helps me see if I should get Vista Premium...or just Basic

 

Makes everything look pretty and 3-d

 

Eye candy. Food for the brain. Some entertainment value.

 

IMO, it is eye candy and nothing else. It has the potential to do much more like a number of the features in beryl/compiz that could enhance usability and productivity but I don't see them being implemented.

I actually found a number of aero effect annoying like the mouse over task bar pop up a preview window(where the text is so small that I cannot see what it really is doing) which blocks the bottom of my active window. Unfortunately, I cannot find a way to have all the features disabled yet still use the scheme(Aero is the only completed scheme in Vista IMO, all others are half baked, looks much worse than XP).

However, Premium has things beyond Aero like the media center. I would say premium is the optimal Vista version, especially when I found the hack to re-enable its RDP server option.

So search around to see if there is promotion models where you don't have to pay extra for premium.

 

It's a trick to get you to buy a faster computer when you really didn't need to.

 

Indeed. I can't imagine why MS hasn't released more themes for Vista via WinUpdate by now. If we're going to have our processes hijacked to feed the Aero beast, we might as well have our choice of eye-candy.

 

I find that aero can be tweaked to look alot of different ways with just its control panel, not sure what you want to achieve with diffrent themes.

everything from colore/hue to transparency level is there.

But as for the OP yeah aero is nothing but the pretty UI in Vista, I still wouldnt get basic because its half the reason to own Vista

 

All of the changes in Aero are simply changes in luminescence and transparency. That isn't the same thing as a theme change. I'd like to achieve the same thing everyone else looks for when seeking a theme change, regardless of OS - a change in the theme I choose to use on my computer. Inevitably, 3rd party themes will come along. However, I wish MS would take the steps to design and release some themselves. With XP, over 5 or however many years that was the flagship, we received three thremes - Luna, Royale, and Zune. That's rather lame. Hopefully we won't have to wait until Vienna to see a new default option available for a Microsoft Operating System.

 

what do you guys mean other themes? what would be different than Aero?

 

I suggest you get premium, there's no DVD playback included with Basic. I'm sure there's some other problems MSFT included with Basic to convince you to get Premium.

 

As horrible as Home Premium looks, Home Basic looks worse. Even worse than classic scheme.

 

It's not just simply changes to luminescence and transparency. It is intended to be a cleaner, more powerful, more efficient and more aesthetically pleasing user interface, encompasses a set of user interface design guidelines. The transparencies around the windows are to improve focus on the contents of the window, not on the taskbar or titlebar. Technically, the Aero guidelines also applies to Home basic, but many may confuse Aero with just the transparencies and eye candy.

 

No, that's the thing - I do like the look of Aero. I'm just looking for variations of it. If I knew how to make Vista themes, I'd reduce the size of the title bar, extend the spread of the - + x buttons on the upper right, and make little changes like those to suit me. My point is that since the graphics engine is now available, we should have new themes to go with it - beyond the default Aero one. For example, it would have been nice if they'd made an updated Luna theme that combined the playfulness of that theme with the lines and aesthetics of Aero. Instead, they got rid of everything but Aero and a handful of Win2k themes.

And the sentence you quoted was me countering the post above mine, where the poster didn't seem to understand why I would want more than one theme on my computer. Modifying Aero still leaves you with Aero. Disabling transparency and painting it green doesn't make it a different theme. The dimensions are still the same. The angles haven't changed. It's still Aero. Which is why saying "Aero is customizable" doesn't really address what I'm talking about, as I'm talking about multiple themes, and not merely about customization within *one* theme.

 

Sorry I just came up with a really stupid joke suddenly (its late and I have worked 2 weeks straight 10 hours a day with not one day off) that I think almost nobody will understand the reference unless they play world of warcraft are into underground humor.

So with that said here it is.

Chuck Norris roundhouse kicked windows xp so hard the color came out and it became aero.