Simple Patch to Enable / Activate Aero Glass Theme in Windows Vista Home Basic Edition

Windows Vista Home Basic edition doesn’t come with Aero interface, so you don’t get the transparency and glass effects at all. Once we posted a small tutorial for enabling Aero theme in Home Basic edition which you can read here. It works but some people reported that it didn’t work for them.

Today we are going to share another method to enable Aero theme in Windows Vista Home Basic edition. Actually Basic edition can provide the Aero interface but its disabled by default. So if your system hardware meets the minimum requirements to run Aero theme, you can give following method a try.

We would like to clear, we have not tested this method yet. So we request you to try the method and post your comments about it:

1. First you’ll need “Ave’s Vista Style Builder” program which is not free. You’ll need to purchase it but its worth to buy.

2. Now open your theme’s .msstyles file in this program. If you are using Windows default theme, open “%windir%\Resources\Themes\Aero\Aero.msstyles” file in this program. (Here %windir% means “Windows” directory present in the system drive where Windows Vista is installed.)

3. Now navigate to “Fonts, Colors & System Metrics -> Colors (Globals)” section.

4. In right-side pane, you’ll see a property with the name “COLORIZATIONCOLOR:INT“.

5. You’ll need to change its value to 0 (Yup, Zero).

6. Now save the file and re-apply the theme and you’ll get Aero theme enabled in your system.

All credit goes to “killermole23” @ DA for finding this cool trick and thanks to “fediaFedia” for sharing it…

UPDATE: An already patched Aero.msstyles file is available to download here. So you no longer need to manually patch the file. Also manually patching can be done using any free Hex Editor like XVI32. Open the .msstyles file, find DF DF DF FF and change it with 00 00 00 00. Save the file and re-apply the theme.