This question is specifically about Windows Embedded Standard 7, however I believe it is relevant for non-embedded Windows 7 also. I am using an i7-2600 / i7-2600K with Intel HD2000/HD3000 graphics.
In Windows 7 (possibly others too?) a popup can occur asking "Do you want to change color scheme to improve performance?" Some details in this question.
What I am interested in is not a method to suppress the popup but a way of triggering the popup on-demand. Hear me out: we are using WES7 for an embedded product for which no popups are acceptable (the user may have no mouse to dismiss them and may need to restart the machine as a result) and there have been reports of this popup occurring very occasionally. The plan is to fix whatever it is that is causing the popup, and also to suppress the popup itself, even if there is a problem. In order to fix the underlying problem (Some bug in our app? lack of some resource? Improper use of GPU?) it would be helpful to know exactly what state(s) can cause the popup. And in order to make absolutely certain that the popup is suppressed, it would be useful to be able to trigger it reliably.
So what state, exactly, triggers this popup? It has been suggested that it is directly related to GPU memory. In that link there is an experiment where they open lots of applications and watch the (dynamic) gpu memory rise. However they also mention that in their case, instead of getting the popup, Windows just changes to the basic color scheme automatically with no warning. When I reproduced the experiment I found the same thing - Windows turned Aero off with no warning or popup.
I also wrote a little WPF app designed to eat up dynamic GPU memory that opens and closes lots of windows containing bitmaps. Sure enough, dynamic GPU memory steadily rises until eventually windows turns off Aero with no warning or popup. This happened in my case when I reached the very upper limit (~1650MB)
I was able to eat up dedicated GPU memory by connecting screens and setting them to be very high resolution. Again dedicated memory would rise and Windows would disable Aero automatically with no warning or popup when it reached close to the limit. (64MB in my case)
I know that the popup can occur on this combination of hardware and WES7 image, but I'm unable to make it happen. From my experiments it seems not to be directly linked to some threshold in GPU memory (dedicated or dynamic), it seems there is some other factor.
We have also had one instance of part of our app becoming unresponsive at the same time as the popup appearing, so any info about the conditions that can produce the popup may be clues towards what caused this hang. Possibly.
Does anyone have a reliable method of triggering the popup on their machine, instead of Windows just disabling Aero automatically? Does anyone know exactly what conditions cause the popup, as distinct from the automatic Aero disabling?
