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I've been playing with Microsoft's newest Vista build (5270) and the first thing I wanted to see was how the compatibility with games was with it. First the bad news, the drivers that come "out of the box" are ok if all you want is Direct-draw, flash games and the sort, but not so great if you want to play anything really cool, full blown 3D gaming applications. Now the good, with a few easy steps you can have the best of both DWM and Direct3D functionality, read on.
Now I have a Saphire Atlantis Radeon 9600 so I went to the ATI.com drivers page and was pleasently surprised that there were in fact Longhorn/Vista drivers available. A quick download later and they don't work. Who would think that drivers from ATI for an ATI device, for the OS specified wouldn't work? That's modern-day computing for you. In any case, I unistalled, rebooted with the standard VGA drivers in place and went back to ATI.com. I said to myself "What the heck." and went for the latest XP drivers, not the 2000 drivers, that's a different driver altogether. Downloaded, I started up the "setup.exe" file and...it hangs on me, BUT not before it extracted all of it's files into "C:ati". This was the way I was able to manually update the drivers for my display adapter(Video card).
Maybe a bit of instruction for the inexperienced? Hit the "START" button next right-click on "Computer" then click on "Properties", this is the same as also opening the system contol panel BTW, next click on "Hardware" on the left hand side and this will open a new window. Click on "Device Manager" which opens the, get this, the Device Maganer. Open the Display adapter field if not already opened, due to bad drivers and what not. Right-click on your video card and select "Update driver" Follow the prompts that allow you to pick your choice of driver and not an automatic choice. Browse for the "inf" file and update away. Reboot and away you go.
Now that you have new drivers installed, you noticed that Aero/Glass and the new Desktop windows manager is now disabled. This is something of bit of a disappointment. But do not worry, there is a way to get around this hold up, and it's called "Regedit".
**Standard legal blah blah blah stuff**
The use of regedit can leave your system in a state of well, in the state of being a paperweight, until you reformat and reinstall windows that is. SO I nor newsvine.com, take any responsibility for any damges that may happen by following any of the advice int his column. Although, if you do it right, you should be just fine.
You will be adding the same two keys in two different places. It's actually very simple and even if you mess up the only thing that SHOULD happen is DWM won't work until you fix the problem.
1) Open regedit.exe
2) Go to "ComputerHkey_Local_MachineSoftwareMicrosoft"
3) Right-click on the Microsoft folder and make a new key named DWM
4) Make a new DWORD value and name it "EnableMachineCheck"
5) Make sure the value is set to 0 (zero)
6) Make a second DWORD value and name it "UseMachineCheck"
7) Make sure it is set to 0 "zero"
8) repeat steps 3-7 at "ComputerHkey_Current_UserSoftwareMicrosoft"
9) Reboot
You should now have DWM on by default, if not hit Ctrl+Shift+F9,it is the hotkey combination to toggle it on and off, and there you go, DWM (LDDM/WDDM) capability WITHOUT DWM approved drivers, and with full Direct3D enabled, well, up to DX8 it seems,for now.
Hope this helps a few of you out there, it took me forever to find this information.
+update+ I have also included 2 reg files that will do all of the above with to double clicks, you can right-click on them and hit edit and see that nothing malicous is in the reg files.
