Unable to switch to Aero

[Disp350]

I noticed today that I could not use the Aero flip screen. When I went into
the Window Color and Appearance settings, there was not even a choice to
switch to the Aero interface. First I did a System Restore from 3 days ago
with no luck. Then I found a newer driver for my ATI Radeon X1300 video card
and installed it. Still no luck. Any suggestions on how to restore the Aero
interface?

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

Did you have AERO before? How much RAM is in the system? Also, does your
card support the Windows Display Driver Model? Try refreshing your WEI
indexing rating and see if it fixes the problem. Click start > type
Performance Information and Tools > then click the Refresh Now button.

 

[Disp350]

I have been using Aero since I got the system about a month ago. I did swap
video cards a few days after I received it, but after installing the
drivers, Aero was running fine with no problems. My system is a Dell E520
with a dual core 2.13 CPU, 2GB of RAM and the video card is an ATI Radeon
X1300 with 256MB of RAM. The card does support WDDM and after I posted the
original message, I did find a suggestion to run the WEI index again. I
found that it had never been run. I was unable to run it a first, but after
finding a fix, it did run successfully. The Base score was 4.1, with
Graphics coming in at 4.6.

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

And after running WEI did you try enabling AERO through the usual
procedures? Personalization > Themes > Windows AERO.

 

[Disp350]

Yes, and it still was not available as a choice when selecting Colors.
However, I continued to do some more research and finally came across a
white paper from Microsoft called Windows Vista Rules for Enabling Windows
Aero. Here is the link:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/aero_rules.mspx

I ended up tracing the problem to the DWM service being disabled. As soon
as I restarted it and waited a minute, Aero immediately came back as a
choice. I was able to successfully get it running again. I am know going
through the log files in event viewer to track the problem down. I have two
apps that require Vista Basic, one of which is Flight Simulator X and the
logs note when it asks to switch to Vista Basic. The other is a neat program
called DosBox that allows you to run older DOS programs (still have a few of
them I use once in a while) in a full DOS environment with sound and video
loaded. I think that may be the problem, so I uninstalled it for now.

Thanks for your replies and assistance. I am very grateful.