Form & Beauty Over Toys

Windows Desktop Manager has a nasty habit of disrupting people's games with a message about how their color scheme has been changed, specifically "The color scheme has been changed to Windows 7 Basic". Well, a new friend of mine over on the Bitsum Forum, "gtweak", came up with a genius little program that helps to bypass Windows interrupting video intensive games with that stupid "Do you want to change the color scheme to improve performance?" message in 2 easy steps.

The usual workaround for this is to disable "desktop composition"--for every single game you play! Usually, you have to right-click a game's executable or shortcut, go to properties, go to the compatibility tab, then click "disable desktop composition" and click "okay".

Also, what if you want to record your game and your Windows Desktop at the same time with Fraps? (I do this quite a lot myself.) Well, you can't if you disable "desktop composition" as Fraps and other game recorders depend on normal Aero to be running, which in turn depends on DirectX, which is necessary to record your desktop.

But this program seems to get around that by re-enabling normal Aero after your game starts, yet somehow preventing WDM from interrupting your games with that "color scheme" has been changed message. I've had 99% success this last week or so (for some reason going to LOW resolution in BF3 triggered it). But it needs some broader testing (he wrote it for me, originally) before we can be sure it solves this issue.

http://gtweak.prv.pl/files/gamestarter.zip

How to use it:


First, extract the above zip file to a folder. Then you simply run "gamestarter-makeini.cmd", type the name of the game and drag and drop the game's exe into the cmd window, it then prompts you to add another game, then another, over and over, each one being assigned a number (up to over 2 Billion numbers theoretically). When you're done adding the last game (you can always add more later) you either type X or manually close the window. It then creates a file called "gamestarter.ini" which contains all your game entries.

If you want to add a game later, just run "gamestarter-makeini.cmd" again and type "u" as in "update" and start adding more games. You can alternately type "c" to create a brand new list if you need to start over.

When you want to play a game, run "gamestarter.cmd", type the number of the game you want to run and hit enter; it first disables "desktop composition", starts the game, then re-enables full Aero so that you can still record your desktop while you game using Fraps. For some reason it's helped me to avoid endless game interruptions (BF3 suffers GREATLY from this issue for some reason).

But because these incidents are so random (Windows is a ♥♥♥♥♥ this way) my experience alone doesn't prove that his program works. So I want all of you who've had this issue to download it and add your most video intensive games to it and run them from the cmd window instead of the normal way to see if it works for you, too. And don't forget to disable the compatibility settings except for "run as admin" on any game you test with this!

Again, here is the link:

http://gtweak.prv.pl/files/gamestarter.zip

There are 3 files inside: gamestarter.cmd, gamestarter-cfg.cmd and gamestarter-makeini.cmd You should make a desktop shortcut to "gamestarter.cmd" for your convenience later.

And here is the forum thread (page 3 is where we start seeing success) http://bitsum.net/forum/index.php/topic,1128.15.html Bitsum is the company that produces Process Lasso BTW.

I wish you all success. If it happens that WDM still interrupts your games, I have an older version that that will simply "disable desktop composition" without the added "reenabling Aero" sequence.

Either way, I need to hear from those of you who try it (preferably for several days to be sure) so gtweak can finalize it. Post results here or join the discussion at the above thread. Thanks.