Some machines on network have windows 7 basic theme, others have aero

[ps2mint]

Hi all,

I'm a teacher in a secondary school and am just interested in computers and networking in general. At my school, when I log into certain machines it loads up using windows 7 basic theme, whereas when I log on a machine elsewhere it loads up in an aero theme. The option to change the theme is disabled by the system administrator - because of this I thought that all machines connected to the network would use a consistent theme. How come this isn't the case?

 

Many thanks!

[Guest kiest90]

We set our background and screensaver by policy and prevent personalisation. This doesn’t set a particular theme and therefore doesn’t enable Aero. As for some machines having Aero and others not this is usually enabled during driver installation so if Microsoft’s out of box driver is installed or an out dated driver is Aero may not have been enabled.

 

Hope that makes sense

[3s-gtech]

It is possible to force the Aero theme, override the Basic settings applying by GPO, and also to set them in the registry. We do all of these - the occasional PC will still drop to Basic but most work fine. Sometimes profiles will store the theme so it may be worth clearing these too.