Blue Badge New and Improved, Aero Peek!

A new version of Rafael’s Blue Badge tool for Windows 7 has been released.  This new version brings many improvements as well as implementing a few rather interesting discoveries that were made.  The other night (I think it was Saturday), we started digging around in a build of Windows 7 that out of the box that had all of the features protected but was known to have working Aero Peek.  Conventional Blue Badge patching was not working to enable peek.  As a matter of fact, everything except peek was working.

This led us to do something that caused us to discover how it works internally.  We set our machine names and criteria to match the Microsoft criteria the build checks for and everything turned on, including Aero Peek.  After a little investigating, Rafael found code references to checks pointing to specific registry keys that when set to a certain value, will turn on the feature associated with said key.  So we dug up all the ID’s, compiled them together, set the proper attribute value, and voila, blue badge, the easy way.

So just to outline, here are the improvements in this revision of the Blue Badge tool:

  • Completely Build Independent: Will work on any build of Windows 7 that contains protected features.  This version of the tool works perfectly on build 6801 as well as 6936.
  • No Patching of System Files: This revision works its magic through the registry, no system files are altered in any way.
  • Blue Badge on a Per-User Basis: since this tool applies the feature ID’s under HKCU, you can patch each account at your own discretion and compare.  So you can have users with all the features, and others without.
  • Enables Aero Peek on 6801: After using this revision of the tool, users of build 6801 will be able to enjoy fully functioning aero peek on their machines.

That pretty much wraps it up, look below for download links for the tool as well as a link to Rafael’s post about the new tool (where he even includes a new flowchart).

Download: Revision 3 for x86 and x64

View: Rafael’s Post

Posted by: Chris123NT

Published on: December 9th, 2008 at 11:14 PM

Posted in Tips and Tricks, Windows 7

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One Response to 'Blue Badge New and Improved, Aero Peek!'

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  1. December 10, 2008 at 9:57 am

    blunden:

    Cool. Not really needed at the moment (unless build 6956 hides some features too) but probably useful in the future and for those that have problems with build 6956. :)

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