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David Overton's Blog » How to get great moving Aurora background on your Vista desktop today
How to get great moving Aurora background on your Vista desktop today

There is a benchmark / system test tool in Vista called WinSAT.  You can test all sorts of things and those of you who want to poke around in it you can.

However I found a less than used feature and it gives you an expensive Aurora backdrop in Windows.  To make this work, open up an elevated cmd prompt and type the following:

start /B winsat aurora & net stop uxsms & net start uxsms

This will set the winsat tool running and give you a nice backdrop and re-enable aero on your desktop.  You may need to press the Windows key to see yoru task bar again.

Please note WinSAT is a test program, not designed to be a backdrop displayer, but it does look very pretty.

ttfn

David

Posted Thu, Jan 11 2007 12:03 AM by David Overton
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Comments

Chris wrote re: How to get great moving Aurora background on your Vista desktop today
on Thu, Mar 8 2007 7:41 PM

Cool! What an incredibly worthless yet fun and a cool way to impress the easily impressed trick. Thanks for the tip.

Attie wrote re: How to get great moving Aurora background on your Vista desktop today
on Mon, Jun 11 2007 8:07 PM
Thought I was going to get the steps to activate it on my laptop just to find that this tip is worth nothing! Could someone please give me a way to enable it on my laptop?
David Overton wrote re: How to get great moving Aurora background on your Vista desktop today
on Mon, Jun 11 2007 9:19 PM

Attie,

your machine has to meet a certain standard to get Aero.  1st off you have to have a version of Vista that supports it - i.e. Vista Ultimate.  Then you have to go to Windows Updates and look at the Ultimate Extras.  Download the DreamScene one and off you go.

thanks

David

Kezza wrote re: How to get great moving Aurora background on your Vista desktop today
on Sun, Nov 9 2008 9:55 AM

This is awesome, rather disappointed however that it doesn't count as a desktop BG but it does look cool. I got it to work on my vista laptop. Wonderful

Wesley wrote re: How to get great moving Aurora background on your Vista desktop today
on Tue, Nov 18 2008 5:58 PM

Ok,,,  i got that  but only i get is a sort of screensaver   when i click i get my old background again... so its not a real background .. ????  did i do something wrong

rex wrote re: How to get great moving Aurora background on your Vista desktop today
on Wed, Sep 8 2010 12:12 AM

omg i have windows 7 and it has winsat i just found out and it just wont open plzzz help?

alex wrote re: How to get great moving Aurora background on your Vista desktop today
on Sun, Oct 31 2010 5:46 PM

how do you turn it off, in know it will be something extreamly simple but please tell me

David Overton wrote re: How to get great moving Aurora background on your Vista desktop today
on Tue, Nov 2 2010 6:41 AM

to stop this, type taskkill -f -im winsat.exe

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