Windows Aero is the standard graphical user interface that most Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems ship with.
Microsoft made the decision during the Windows Vista release to block some or even all Aero effects in some editions of the operating system, and has continued that strategy during the release of Windows 7.
To be precise: Windows Aero is not available in Windows Vista Home Basic and Windows 7 Starter, and only partially enabled in Windows 7 Home Basic.
But there is another problem that users can encounter when trying to get Windows Aero to work.
Microsoft has build in a hardware check that performs a scan of the operating system before enabling Aero. It will block Aero from being executed if the hardware of the device fails that check. This can usually be attributed to not meeting one or multiple of the minimum hardware requirements to run Aero.
Aero Enabler
Aero Enabler has been created by the developer to enable Windows Aero in Windows Vista and Windows 7 regardless of whether it is supported, or not.
It’s primary purpose is to enable Aero on Windows Vista Home Basic and Windows 7 Home Basic. It will only be enabled if the computer system passes the hardware check to ensure that the system will run stable even with Aero enabled.
The minimum requirements to run Windows Aero are:
- 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
- 1 GB of system memory
- DirectX 9 compatible graphics processor with a Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) driver, Pixel shader 2.0 in hardware, and a minimum of 128 MB of Video RAM
- 40 GB hard drive with 15 GB free space
The software comes with a switch to disable the hardware check which only makes sense if the hardware check failed even though the hardware is capable of running Windows Aero. Enabling Aero on a computer system that does not meet the requirements could result in all kinds of problems including performance and stability issues.
Windows 7 Home Basic and Windows Vista Home Basic users who want to give Aero Enabler a try can download the software at the developer’s website.
Note that the program requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 to run.