aero interview questions
Top aero frequently asked interview questions
Windows 7 Aero used to have a drop shadows on the windows, which was great because you could easily tell which window was active. See below:
Is there a setting to get the drop shadow back in Windows 8?
Source: (StackOverflow)
I'm always accidentally minimizing most of my windows. This is really annoying. How do I disable Aero Shake?
Source: (StackOverflow)
Ocassionally aero effects crash. Is there a way to re-enable the effects in Windows 7 after a crash happens?
i.e. restarting a service or terminatating a process and letting it restart automaticially or manually loading it?
Problem symptoms; in
Control Panel \ Appearance and Personalization \ Personalization
The standard "Window Color" option is not available it just appears as "Basic"
Reboot will solve this issue, but would like to avoid that if possible.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I've scoured the web, but I'm sick of reading "scan your computer for viruses" and "upgrade your RAM" on answers to similar questions to this. I understand that dwm.exe is for (simply put) caching bitmaps for things like Aero-peek and similar, but as far as I have read it shouldn't be using vast amounts of memory.
My colleague and I both have 4GB of RAM, Core 2 Duo, blah, blah -- essentially they're pretty capable. His dwm.exe is running at around 30mb, mine is currently running at about half a gig, though it does fluctuate quite a lot. This is the same while running the exact same applications (currently Zend studio, FireFox (with firemin - low memory usage), Outlook). Every so often I will get a notification asking me if I want to switch to Aero Basic because it's using too much memory, and sometimes it will just switch itself to basic and let me know why.
I know it's possible to stop it switching, but I want to know why it is using too much memory otherwise it's just papering over the cracks.
One thing to add is this seems to have started after a robbery on Monday, where two of my monitors were stolen, and I had to temporarily use a couple of alternative monitors. I am now using brand new monitors but the problem is the same. All drivers installed and working seemingly fine.
Any ideas why the usage is so high?
We are using windows 7 64-bit Professional.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I'm using UltraVNC to remote desktop onto a Windows 7 box (it allows you to keep Aero turned on whilst doing remote desktop, whereas Windows' RDP does not). However, for some reason this seems to cause Windows to think lots of memory is being used by Aero. After a while of being logged in, I usually get the following message:
Upon clicking on this popup, I get the following warning dialog (and the help dialog if I click on the help link at the bottom):
If I elect to keep the current color scheme, I will quite soon after get the following message:
And clicking on this produces the following help dialog:
I know Windows thinks it's doing me a favour here, and performance is quite slow when I'm in remote desktop and Aero is turned on. However, I specifically want to keep Aero on because I'm testing how some stuff looks with Aero turned on. Is there any way to tell Windows, "leave Aero on no matter what the performance hit"? Even a registry setting or something? I haven't found any way to stop Windows from turning Aero off automatically.
Source: (StackOverflow)
Back in Windows 7, when one presses alt+tab the "Windows Flip" menu appears and if (s)he holds alt but stops pressing tab, a preview of the app appears. In Windows 10, the behaviour is different: the menu looks different (not sure if it can be still refered as "Windows Flip") and holding alt without pressing tab doesn't bring the preview. While I'm ok with the menu itself, I wonder if there's a way to bring the preivew back.
The problem is also described here; let me bring the screenshot from there to illustrate what preview I'm talking about:
(I add the windows-7 tag so that gentlemen familiar with its internals may help too)
PS As mentioned in comments, Aero Peek works for me for previewing desktop (when cursor hovers over bottom right corner thing on TaskBar); and also works with elements on TaskBar (hover mouse over an element → get a smaller preview; hover mouse over that preview → get full window preview which is what I miss when using alt+tab).
Source: (StackOverflow)
The menu containing Restore, Move, Resize, Minimize, Maximize and Close accessible through right click on a window titlebar or click on the upper left form icon, was before the new Aero stuff available from right click on an active program in the task bar.
How can I access it now from the task bar?
I use it when a window is outside the screen, by selecting Move and then pressing an arrow, and then move the mouse cursor to where I want the window and finally clicking where I want it.
As a workaround, to retrieve a window that is outside the current screen (say that you have 2 screens and one is currently showing another pc) I'm doing the following:
- Alt tab to the program
- Press ALT-SPACE
- Press m
- Press an arrow key
- Move the mouse into view
- Left click the mouse
However, I think it's better to be able to see the menu rather than guessing the menu.
Is it possible to show the above mentioned menu from the task bar?
Source: (StackOverflow)
My Desktop Window Manager memory usage keeps spiking and causing it to disable Aero, saying it ran out of allowed memory. DWM restarts and comes back up fine when I kill its process. Why is this happening? How can I correct it? Can I change the amount of memory it's allowed?
Hardware:
- Intel Core 2 Quad / EVGA 680i mobo
- 8GB Patriot DDR2
- (3x) Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4760 (multi-mon setup, not Crossfire setup)
Edit:
New system. Now on an AMD Phenom 2 1055T with 16GB DDR3. Same install of Windows 7 and same video cards (Though the new mobo, an MSI nf980-g65 also has onboard HDMI, which I'm now also using). Same exact issue.
I find it happens more often when I have browser(s) open, and when I have Seesmic (A Silverlight out-of-browser application) open.
Source: (StackOverflow)
Possible Duplicate:
How do I disable Aero Shake in Windows 7?
Sometimes, and I really don't know how to do it, when I grab an application in the window-bar and drag it around, as if I'm waving, then all other windows are minimized to the taskbar.
I have three questions:
- how do I do this?
- what's this feature called in Windows 7
- how can I disable this Windows 7 feature?
I know I can undo it by hitting Ctrl+Shift+Winkey+M.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I just installed Windows Server 2008 R2, including the Desktop Experience feature, and activated the Themes service. I've activated Aero.
I have everything there, except that when I drag windows, I only see the border of the window as I'm dragging. In other/older SKUs of Windows, there was a checkbox that I think said "Show Window Contents While Dragging", but I can't find such a checkbox on this OS.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I am running Windows 7 with Aero enabled and everything about my theme unchanged. I have tried various ways of adjusting colors and translucency, but I can't seem to find a way to make the active window's titlebar more distinctive (compared with the inactive windows).
I don't mind registry or manual theme hacking (if someone can explain what I need to do), but I can't go downloading arbitrary software on to my machine.
Here is a screenshot of two windows, the one on the left being the active window:
Ideas?
Source: (StackOverflow)
This has intrigued me for quite some time.
Does anyone know the algorithm Windows 7 Aero uses to determine the colour to use as the hot-tracking hover highlight on taskbar buttons for currently-running apps?
It is definitely based on the icon of the app, but I can't see a specific pattern of where it's getting the colour value from.
It doesn't seem to be any of the following:
- An average colour value from the entire icon, otherwise you would get brown
all the time with multi-coloured icons like Chrome.
- The colour used the most in the image, otherwise you'd get yellow for the SQL Server Management Studio icon (6th from left). Also, the Chrome icon used red, green and yellow in equal measure.
- A colour located at certain pixel coordinates within the icon, because Chrome is red - indicating the top of the icon - and Notepad++ (2nd from right) is green - indicating the bottom of the icon.
I asked this question on ux.stackoverflow.com and it got closed as off-topic, but someone answered with the following:
As described by Raymond Chen in this MSDN blog article:
Some people ask how it's done. It's really nothing special. The code
just looks for the predominant color in the icon. (And, since visual
designers are sticklers for this sort of thing, black, white, and
shades of gray are not considered "colors" for the purpose of this
calculation.)
However I wasn't really satisfied with that answer because it doesn't explain how the "predominant" colour is calculated. Surely on the SQL Management Studio icon, the predominant colour, to my eyes at least, is yellow. Yet the highlight is green. I want to know, specifically, what the algorithm is.
Source: (StackOverflow)
Brand new machine that was working fine then randomly it changed the theme when I booted into a sort of "basic" theme (white task bar, no see through windows etc)
I've done and attempted many fixes and I still don't understand why it doesn't work. I've tried these two solutions:
"How to enable Windows 7 Aero Theme"
and
"Windows 7 Aero Themes Greyed out"
These solutions included registy changes, stopping/starting services, and force starting the aero theme. The closest I got seems to be when I went into:
Control panel (category view) > Find and fix problems (System and Security) > Display Aero Desktop Effects
I follow through the wizard and let it do its thing and then I get an error window that pops up:
Personalization - "This theme can't be applied to the desktop. Try clicking a diffrent theme."
That's what I get from the wizard. What can I do? My drivers are all up to date, there are no viruses on the computer, directx is installed and updated, and the registry is all correct.
EDIT:
When I boot the computer, I get a notification stating that windows failed to communicate with the windows desktop services.
Source: (StackOverflow)
This question already has an answer here:
In Windows 7, in the Aero interface, if you move the mouse over an icon it gets highlighted. This is definitely pretty, but sometimes the system gets into a state where the highlight gets stuck, and whichever button you hovered over last with the mouse cursor remains highlighted even when you move the mouse out of the taskbar. This can be very distracting if you're expecting the taskbar icons to tell you something useful, such as displaying a progress bar or turning orange if you have a new IM.
I did a bit of searching about this issue, and the only thing I came up with was this. And the response, from Microsoft support no less, could hardly be less helpful. The question was, "the highlighting gets stuck sometimes and doesn't go away until I reboot." And the answer basically says "did you try rebooting? That ought to fix it."
So, does anyone know anything useful about this issue? Does anyone know what causes it (and thus how I can avoid having it happen)? Does anyone know a way to fix it that does not require a reboot?
Source: (StackOverflow)
There is a strange bug with Aero Peek and Alt-Tab where the Alt-Tab window itself is sent all of the way to the back, and is obscured by whatever window may be being previewed in front of it. While it still works for switching tabs, it's extremely annoying to not be able to see what other windows are there. One solution I've found is to just disable Aero Peek, but I like the Aero Peek feature when it works, and want it enabled.
Let me reiterate, because every response so far doesn't seem to understand this:
I do not want to turn off aero peek. Do not give me an answer saying that I can disable it in the performance options. I will downvote your answer. Read every word of my question before you answer anything that involves the word "disable".
Some users of Lenovo products have found that uninstalling the "Thinkvantage communications" VoIP suite fixes it for them, but my laptop is an HP, not a Lenovo. The only VoIP software I have installed is Skype, which I removed to see if it had something to do with VoIP, but that didn't have any effect. I had seen this issue before on my old laptop, but it usually went away after a while, and always after a reboot. On my new computer (HP dm4t) it always occurs, and is driving me nuts.
If anybody can actually pinpoint what the problem is and more importantly how to fix it, I will be extremely thankful.
Window being previewed is in front of the Alt-Tab window
Update:
The issue seems to have randomly resolved itself, at least for now. I have no idea what changed, since I haven't made any modifications to the system between when it was broken and when it started working. Attached is another screenshot of it working properly, with the alt-tab window in front of everything else. I'd still like to know what causes this if anybody can determine it.
Update 2:
And now it's broken again...
Update with Windows 7 SP1:
The problem still occurs with Service Pack 1 installed. Still no idea what may be causing it.
Source: (StackOverflow)