Windows 7 Aero Themes Greyed Out?

Oliver SK.

9 years ago

Are your Windows 7 Aero themes greyed out and you cant enable them? If you can’t run or activate any Aero themes you can follow some short instructions to enable Aero themes again or if your graphic card driver does not support WDDM, you can download our registry hack.

Before trying any of these “hacks” make sure you have an appropriate graphic card installed. If you don’t you may have to “force enable” it. We explain how this works below

Can you run Windows 7 Aero Themes?

Answer a few questions and we will quickly find out why the Aero Themes are greyed out in Vista or Windows 7:

Do you have a DirectX8 graphic card or lower?
Does your graphic card have less than 128MB RAM?
Does your PC have less than 1GB RAM?
Do you have a CPU with less than 1Ghz?
Do you use Windows 7 Home Basic?
Do you have a Intel 910 and 915 Express chipset?

If you answered one of the questions with yes, your PC does not fully support Windows 7 Aero Themes!

Requirements for Windows 7 Aero Themes:

The minimum system requirements are:
DirectX9 graphics card
PC with 1Ghz and 1GB RAM
Windows 7 Home Premium or better
WDDM driver

…get the latest graphic card drivers for your graphic card

Themes greyed out? Start troubleshooting!

So, most of the time when the Aero themes are greyed out, your hardware does not support WDDM.

But there can be other reasons. E.g. if the service Desktop Window Manager Session Manager is not running.

1. Step Open the control panel.
2. Step Click on “find and fix your problems” below “System and Security”:

3. Step Click on “Display Aero Desktop Effects”:

4. Step Follow the wizard.

Themes still greyed out? Force Enable Aero!

Some drivers simply don’t support WDDM(Windows Display Driver Model ), so you have to force enable Aero via a registry key.

Manual Registry Modification

Insert this into a notepad and save it as a .reg file and execute it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM] "UseMachineCheck"=dword:00000000 "Blur"=dword:00000000 "Animations"=dword:00000000

Download Registry Tweak – Force Enable Aero

Download this registry tweak and double-click on it to add the keys to your registry:

Force Enable Aero Themes

Method 3:

Get more instructions how to enable Windows 7 Aero themes

Download Windows 7 Aero Themes

Worked? If you can enable Aero themes again, you might want to download some of our Aero themes for Windows 7: