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Tool to Re-Enable Aero in Windows 7 When it Crashes

win7aeroWindows 7 is an amazing operating system and the Aero theme is so refreshing to the eyes. Sadly though, once in a while Aero likes to crash, leaving you with solid windows again and no option in Windows to bring it back manually (no obvious way at least). Thank fully this can still be done using cmd.exe.

Attached you can download a zip file that contains a quick .bat file I typed up. Simply extract the .bat file to your desktop and whenever the problem occurs again, right click on it and select “Run as administrator”. The cmd.exe window will pop up and go through a few seconds of switching the Aero theme off and back on again and then it will close itself. That’s it! You’re back to normal in no time at all.

Download: TheSa|nt’s Aero Re-Enabler Tool

If you don’t trust running “mysterious” bat files on your PC (lol, I don’t either), feel free to open it in notepad to see that it is 100% safe. I am posting the contents of the file here as well:

echo Activating TheSaint’s Aero Fixer
echo.
net stop uxsms
echo Waiting For 5 seconds…
TIMEOUT /T 5 /NOBREAK
echo.
net start uxsms

 

echo.

 

 

Enjoy!

Iron Man Custom Windows 7 Start Menu Button (Icon)

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This is a custom start menu button/icon that I cooked up to replace Windows 7’s little blue orb with the logo in it. Instead of that Orb, this gives you Tony Stark’s Arc Reactor which responds to mouse-over and click in it’s own way (normal state, charged/glowing state, and firing state). It’s simple, it’s clean and it looks awesome when you’re rocking an Iron Man theme across Windows. You can find my Windows Logon Screen Wallpapers here to go with it. Instructions on how to set this as your icon are located below the image.

Note: Keep the image in .bmp format or else it will not be usable.

Iron Man Windows 7 Start Menu Icon

 

 

In order to change the icon in your start menu you will have to use a tool. Here is “Windows 7 Start Button Changer” which can do this for you. Make sure, for your own peace of mind, that you set a Windows Restore point just in case. You can never be too careful when playing with Windows’ UI.

Right click on the exe and choose to open it as admin (feel free to scan it before hand with your favorite anti-virus. I used 2 different ones and its nice and clean for me).

It will give you two options, one will be to search for the image above that you should have saved to your PC somewhere and set that as your new icon and the other option restores your original Windows 7 icon back (in case you decide to just set things back to normal).

Keep in mind, that when you set the new icon, the app will close all running sessions of Explorer.exe and restart it which will result in any “Windows Explorer” window that you may have open closing and your task bar will vanish for a moment before it brings it back by restarting explorer.exe’s process. So make sure you are not working in Windows Explorer (file browser) when you make the change.

Done! It is simple as that!

 

If you wish to share this with others, please simply link back to this article to do so. That way the other person(s) will be able to see the full instructions. Thank you.