WindowBlinds 5.5 and Vista Home Basic>

You can't, Aero is required in order to display transparency with Windowblinds and Home Basic doesn't have the WDDM drivers.

I was once told that I could because it could do the same under XP as well.

Unfortunatly, you were mis-informed.  Maybe in the future . . .

So, it wasn't simulating the glass effect under XP at all?

Home Basic has the WDDM drivers. It should work as long as your card supports them.

If you do not have WDDM drivers for your graphics card, then you will not have the aero effect, which is required to have transparency with Vista. The transparency is dependent on the drivers for your graphics card...the software has nothing to do with it.

Interesting, I was under the impression Home Basic had Aero disabled or something (hence it just being Basic and why people were saying it was actually a downgrade from XP).

Home Basic has a very basic Aero. It is Aero without glass, taskbar previews, animations and flip 3D.

I have Home Basic. The screenshots for Vista Home Basic is a little bit misleading on the back of the box.

You can customize your colors and stuff on it.

Hello friends

I need help
Installed my pc but I don't find the skin doesn't appear in the area of the themas

mcf_marcelo,

the skin your trying to use is not a WindowBlinds skin, check out WWW Link

"How does one get the glass effect under Vista Home Basic while using WB 5.5?"

You can't just magically turn on aero's glass windows in windowsblinds. If you have vista home basic or your GPU has no WDDM drivers, you can't get it.

"Home Basic has a very basic Aero. It is Aero without glass, taskbar previews, animations and flip 3D."

Vista Home basic has no aero. all those things you describe are aero. If you go and change the themes in winXP, you see "Windows XP" and "Windows Classic". If you look in vista home basic it has "windows vista basic" in the place of "windows XP". If you look in other versions of vista you get "windows vista standard" and "windows vista aero" in the list as well. These are not in home basic.

However...
It is pretty easy to find a small registry tweak on the internet (i won't help anyone do it, it's probably not legal) that enables "windows vista standard" and "windows vista aero" in that list on home basic as long as you have the right hardware (GPU with WDDM drivers).

There are windowsblinds themes out there to look like vista, and some include "glass windows" even without WDDM hardware. It won't be the same as vista's ones, it'll have lower performance and will probably mess up lots of other aspects of windows as all windows blinds things do (am i right in thinking turning off some features in windowsblinds won't return it to the original vista things, but will return it to "windows classic" for that windows 2000 effect, as it does in XP?). Also these vista immitations are not entirely what one might call "legal" and in particular "VistaXP by ~KoL" has been purged from the whole internet (including wincustomize.com). There are lots of similar ones out there.

I've yet to see any windowsblinds themes that are entirely bug-free. If I can get a theme to change just the window border (or whatever it's called) to a glass effect* without destroying the start menu, fonts, etc. I might upgrade to vista and use windowsblinds. Unfortunately, I can only deduce that WB is a poor product or theme authors are devoid of talent or education as all WB themes are absolute crud.

There are binaries for other aspects of aero, (like sidebar, taskbar thumbnails) but they're very low quality.

*I would pay for something with aero even though it doesn't work on my hardware, so I see it as totaly acceptable.

That's nice...

How to win friends and influence people....

Just wanted to say that you are a cass 1 pinhead

Class?

  Zubas corrected someone. Quick print this out.

.... he said, two years later.....

Dang, Zu.... giving spelling lessons now, eh?

'cass 1 pinhead' on a 2 year old post.