February 2006 - Posts

Upgrading to Commnity Server

I'm planning an upgrade from .Text 0.95 to Community Server 2.0, which recently came out.

I've been neglecting the blog lately, and much spam has accumulated. So I cleaned it up and installed Clearscreen SharpHIP CAPTCHA (you can see it when you try to add comments to a post.)

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Force-Enable DWM in Vista 5308 CTP

I've been toying around with the CTP for a couple of days. There are some very nice stuff to see, and everything seems to be much smoother and faster (beside the setup, that is; I tried a clean install - which took over an hour - and an upgrade from Windows XP [first available in this CTP] - which took well over three hours...)

I have a very old display adapter (ATI Rage Fury Pro) which, in earlier builds, was able to run the DCM/DWM (but not very smoothly, naturally.) This time, the registry hacks to get the DWM ignore the incompatibility didn't work. So I ventured on a mission to find where they hid it this time. This is what I came up with (copy and paste into notepad and save as dwm.reg):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\DWM]
"UseMachineCheck"=dword:00000000

After making this change, just open the task manager and kill dwm.exe. The service will restart itself, and if your adapter is good enough, you'll see Aero Glass. I haven't been thus fortunate myself, so I'll go ahead and buy a new adapter (which is long-due.) Note: if all you see is your desktop flickering like hell, hitting CTRL+ALT+F9 will temporarily disable DWM, and allow you to unsent that registry key (it's enough to change the UseMachineCheck value to 1.)

Other settings I found under the same key: Animations, AnimationsShiftKey, Blur, Composition, DisableDwmRotationDisableDynamicShutdownUI, Schedule, ThreadPriority, UseAlternateButtons, UseDPIScaling (I'm assuming these are all DWORDS, but you should try and see.)

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