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Windows Vista Glass with NVidia driver set

  • Artikkeli

I was having a lot of problems getting Aero Glass to run on my Vista drive on my Toshiba Tecra M5.  It doesn't make any sense because the video card is a 256 MB video card that supports the WDDM driver necessary to run the Glass interface.  I've had several friends have the same problem and after discovering a solution, I thought it was worth blogging.

First off, this is by no means a recommendation of Microsoft, just one employee's method to get it working (after reading Scoble's rants on blogging and the media, I've learned the disclaimer is a necessary evil). This information is provided AS-IS and WITHOUT WARRANTY.

Anyways, NVidia has been working to make all of its video cards run the from the same set of device drivers--something called the "unified driver" set (or something like that). Because of this, any driver you select will have the same settings as the one you're looking to get working.

So, to get it working, you will have to do the following:

  1. Go to www.NVidia.com and download the Vista drivers
  2. Extract the driver set to your local machine
  3. Go to Control Panel->System->Device Manager
  4. Right-click the video card from the tree and select Update Driver...
  5. Don't let it select the best driver from the internet. Install from a specific location. Next >
  6. Don't let it search your machine for a driver, you want to select it yourself. Next >
  7. Click the Have Disk button on select the directory where the NVidia drivers were extracted.
  8. Select a driver that has a name similar to the video card you have. I don't think it really matters, but I wanted to be able to see the right video card name in the device tree.
  9. Click OK through all the prompts that say the device won't work. You'll be forced to reboot and at that point, you should see glass automatically. If it worked you can go to the Personalization screen and select Visual Appearance, you'll now be prompted with the Aero Glass color blending screen.

If this doesn't work, you'll probably be prompted with the black screen that asks you if you want to go back to the last known good configuration. If that doesn't work, you can go into Safe Mode and uninstall the driver from the device manager.

Good luck!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 13, 2006
    The reason they don't work by default is that nVidia doesn't include the PNP id for laptop cards in their default drivers.  In some cases (most notably tablets) there are some features that must be enabled specifically in .inf.  The drivers are all the same it is just slight tweaks in installer, that is why nVidia tells you to go to laptop maker.  Although Toshiba has drivers from the day the laptop shipped usually, as do most others.  They never seem to bother to update.

  • Anonymous
    July 13, 2006
    Thanks for the post! I will give it a burn tonight. I have a Sony with an nVidia card in it and wasn't overly impressed with nVidia forcing me to go to Sony for Vista drivers. Of course, Sony must have some Vista drivers, but I could never find them on their site. So I never really bothered trying Vista because the combination of no Aero, 1024x768 and non-native resolution just made it too clunky to work with.

    Hopefully this works for me too. Cheers!

  • Anonymous
    July 13, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2006
    Worked great. It's like a party on my screen and everyone's invited.

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2007
    Suman thanks a ton...I got Aero working on tecra M7!

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2008
    PingBack from http://softwareinformation.247blogging.info/suman-chakrabarti-aspnet-geek-windows-vista-glass-with-nvidia/