LimeWire and Windows Vista

A surprise awaits you if you mix Windows Vista and LimeWire.

What I’ve heard from those who have Windows Vista, the normal interface (Aero) is really pleasant to look at. Each window has a frame that is glassy, translucent and casts a soft shadow on the desktop. Images behind the glass are blurred thus giving windows a frosted look. The mouse pointer passing over a button causes it to glow and progress bars fill up with a green gel.

When you pull up the task switcher, you will see small preview screens of running programs in a 3D stack that you can cycle through. The task bar also gives a small preview of programs that have been minimized.

Vista also has a plain vanilla look, which you might see if your hardware is not up to the task. Minimum requirements for Aero are 128 megabytes of video memory on the graphics card, 1 GB of system memory and a processor running at 1 GHz. The simpler mode is known as Windows Vista Basic is minus of the bells and whistles.

In addition to the hardware issue, some programs are not compatible with Vista. The popular file sharing software LimeWire is one example. When you run LimeWire you will be kicked into Windows Vista Basic. Vista returns to the Aero interface when LimeWire is shutdown.