Hack to Force Enable Aero in Windows 7

Windows 7 has a nice little Windows Aero troubleshooting tool to find and fix problems with transparency and other visual effects, and then enable and turn on Aero support (and also Aero Peek) in Windows 7. If the tool does not work to enable Aero feature in Windows 7, the trick to force enable Aero in Windows Vista may still work in Windows 7.

Follow these steps in the instruction below to force enable Windows Aero Glass Transparency effect on system with video card (graphic accelerator adapter) that does not meet the WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model ) specifications, which provides functionality required to render the desktop and applications using Desktop Window Manager, a compositing window manager running on top of Direct3D 9.0Ex, and provides device driver interfaces required by Direct3D 10 runtime used in Windows 7.

  1. Open Registry Editor (RegEdit).
  2. Navigate to the following registry key:

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM

    If the DWM registry key is not found, right click on Windows and then select New -> Key to create new branch and name it as DWM.

  3. In the right details pane, create a new DWORD (32-bit value) named UseMachineCheck, and set its value to 0.
  4. In the right details pane, create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value named Blur, and set its value to 0.
  5. In the right details pane, create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value named Animations, and set its value to 0.
  6. Restart the Desktop Window Manager Session Manager in Services in Control Panel (type Services.msc in Start Search), or run the following commands in a command prompt with administrator privileges:

    net stop uxsms
    net start uxsms

  7. Attempt to enable and apply Windows Aero in Windows 7. Restart the computer if required.

The trick above also may work to enable Aero on Windows 7 and Windows Vista installed on virtual machine (VM), especially in Virtual PC 2007. VPC 2007 uses S3 as virtual display adapter, which is capable of running Windows Aero. When the guest Windows 7 or Vista OS uses software-based hardware check after hack above, it will find only S3, couple with actual Aero-capable video card, may allow Aero to run in VMs as in real physical machine.


This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 2:34 am and is filed under Windows 7. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

32 Responses to “Hack to Force Enable Aero in Windows 7”

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  1. eee pc 701 user
    November 8th, 2009 21:58
    32

    This will NOT work on asus eee pc 701 it will turn the screen black and just left the watermark

  2. joe
    November 8th, 2009 07:39
    31

    I was wondering if anybody knew if a Intel GMA 900 integrated graphics would work… On wikipedia it says it theoretically works but there is no WDDM driver so this is what this hack is for, right?

  3. rt
    November 6th, 2009 21:37
    30

    this does not work.. any other solutions for that? I have a intel 915 on my notebook, so I need a hack to enable aero..

  4. sendblink
    October 12th, 2009 23:02
    29

    Those last 2 comments 27 & 28 are complete bullshit this does not work on RTM, I know this because it worked for me fine on the beta versions *Before RC… then the rest *betas after RC it stopped working.

  5. fabiode34
    October 4th, 2009 23:05
    28

    this worked fine on Windows 7 Final Version.

  6. Glenn
    September 16th, 2009 09:50
    27

    This WORKED for me on Windows 7 RTM!

    After I installed my ASUS Radeon 4870 Dark Knight 1GB, aero stopped working and the Win 7 fixer couldn’t fix it. This “hack” did the trick!

  7. andy
    July 31st, 2009 09:32
    26

    1 Read the article carefuly
    2 comments allready state that this does not work

    for those who screens turned black, you need to have had met all hardware req.(128 Mb vcard) but didn’t have driver

    if you had req., nothing should have happened instead of a black screen

    this is a vista and early w7 trick

    does not work for later and rtm

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