Windows 7 Aero Coherence view shows Windows background

J

jkwuc89

Member
After doing a clean install of Parallels Desktop 5, I created a new Windows 7 Ultimate VM. After the VM was created and Parallels Tools was installed, the Windows 7 VM correctly displayed Aero effects when the VM was set to display in a window or full screen.

When I switched my VM view to Coherence, the transparency effect for Windows apps showed the Windows background and not the Mac OS X background. The attached screen shows what I am seeing.

Is this normal behavior for Coherence with Areo effects are enabled?
 

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Mine does the same, so I'm also wondering this. I'm sure one of the brief writeups I read on one of the Mac sites today showed a photo with the Mac desktop showing through. I'll try to find it.
 
jkwuc89 said:
Is this normal behavior for Coherence with Areo effects are enabled?
Click to expand...
It is normal. I don't have a clue how they could get the compositing engine of Windows Vista/7 to act upon the Mac background which it does not even know it exist. That would be extremely convoluted to program and of highly doubtful value: Mac OS X itself does not do that with its own windows, why would Windows windows on top of Mac OS X have to do it? ;)
 
Olivier said:
It is normal. I don't have a clue how they could get the compositing engine of Windows Vista/7 to act upon the Mac background which it does not even know it exist. That would be extremely convoluted to program and of highly doubtful value: Mac OS X itself does not do that with its own windows, why would Windows windows on top of Mac OS X have to do it? ;)
Click to expand...

Fair enough, but if it's going to show the Windows desktop (ie. in Coherence mode) then why have it at all? You might as well just show opaque borders.
 
You could cheat like me, close all your apps, hide your dock and take a screen shot (stitch the 2 if you have dual monitors) and set that as your W7 wallpaper. It won't show windows open on your mac but it will show the right background which can be interesting too, and more correct than it is now.
 
ZakA said:
You could cheat like me, close all your apps, hide your dock and take a screen shot (stitch the 2 if you have dual monitors) and set that as your W7 wallpaper. It won't show windows open on your mac but it will show the right background which can be interesting too, and more correct than it is now.
Click to expand...

Good idea ZakA - might give this a try tonight. Though in my (admittedly limited) testing, Aero had a significant knock on overall performance which I'm questioning the value of.

Thanks - in any case.
 
If you are gaming turn it off it does kill performance severely in that case. Since it can't play my game at all I have just resorted to playing around with the app, it would be turned off if I was playing my game.
 
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