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Wednesday 11 May 2011

Turn On Window Shadows

New miscellaneous util: Turn On Window Shadows

If another human on planet earth finds this useful I'll be amazed. :-)

Running TurnOnWindowShadows.exe has the same effect as going to Start -> Control Panel -> System and Security -> System -> Advanced system settings -> (UAC) Yes -> Advanced -> (Performance) Settings -> Visual Effects and turning on Show shadows under windows.

I wrote this little thing because I use Window Clippings v3 to take screenshots and whenever I take a screenshot while using Remote Desktop it turns off the system shadow setting. The shadow setting has no effect on Remote Desktop so it's not immediately clear anything is wrong but when I return to using the machine locally all the window shadows are gone, which is just weird with the Aero/glass theme. I got sick of going through the convoluted route above to turn shadows back on and made a program I could drop on my Directory Opus taskbar-style launcher toolbar to make the change in one click.

2 comments:

  1. I thought for a minute you'd worked out how to enable window shadows within Remote Desktop :(

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  2. Sadly not. It's weird how even if you've got DWM/glass enabled over Remote Desktop (requiring Windows 7 Ultimate at the remote end), you still don't get shadows. Glass looks pretty bad without them.

    ReplyDelete