I use Windows 7 in a virtual machine most of the time and occasionally I’ve been finding that the machine checker is disabling Aero. Now, you might argue that I shouldn’t be running Aero in a virtual machine (and Windows 7 does seem to agree), but occasionally I need to test this, that or the other and besides, the iron that the VM sits on has no problem running anything else I throw at it. So, I find myself looking to disable that pesky check, which apparently I need to use a registry hack to do.
So go to the following key in the registry (regedit), HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsDWM and create a new DWORD called UseMachineCheck setting it to 0. Then create another called Animations and set it to 0 as well. Then create yet another called Blur (there’s no other way, there’s no other way, all that you can do is watch them play), and set its value to 0.
Then kickstart Desktop Window Manager Session Manager using the net stop and net start commands as follows:
net stop uxsms
net start uxsms
Note: This also works in Vista.