Vista Video Mode Drops From Aero to Basic
There may be many reasons for Windows Vista to down-shift its Video Mode from Aero to Basic. In all instances, something is going wrong with the way an application is accessing the display functions within Windows. But what? That can be the really daunting question.
For me, the problem surfaced when I was replacing my laptop’s hard drive with a bigger one. In addition to the “opportunity” to reload Vista along with everything else, a benefit is that things come out much cleaner in the end. It’s an exercise I expect to have to grind through at least once every couple of years.
And having gone through it enough on a personal level, I’m sympathetic to what my clients have to go through during the process also. But for as annoying as it can be, it’s definitely worth it in terms of regaining performance and streamlining everything.
But as luck would have it, Paint Shop Pro Photo XI – my trusted graphics editor – wasn’t as impressed with all my labor as it could have been. It kicked the video mode back from Aero to “Basic” whenever it ran. As loathe as I am to throw money at a problem, I did see this as an opportunity to upgrade to Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate for about $60, and I hoped that installing it might just purge my little video Gremlin.
No such luck. X2 dropped the video mode back to Basic, too. Drat.
One of the “extras” that comes with X2 is a couple of sets of video tutorials that seemed might ease the familiarization curve with the new product. So, by chance in the middle of troubleshooting stuff, I fired up one of the videos. Vista dropped out of Aero and into Basic again. But the videos didn’t rely on the Paint Shop Pro product itself at all. In fact, they are apparently MOV videos that launched in Quicktime player.
Ah ha! I had installed a German language instructional program, the Berlitz Learning System, which I remembered was the first source of Quicktime that my Laptop had seen since the new drive was installed. So I checked the version of the player that launched with the Paint Shop Pro videos, and compared that to the current version on the Apple website.
Installed: 7.0.4. Current: 7.5.5. I hadn’t yet installed iTunes and there is a download for Quicktime + iTunes, so I snagged it and installed – being careful not to just blindly accept the installation defaults.
On the other side, everything’s coming up Aero around here!
