[Win7] Forcing Aero for Affinity Designer

[Electronic Dope Design]

Hello everybody,

 

if you should run into problems with lunching Affinity Designer on Windows 7 due to Aero not beeing enabled (Yes it's wierd ... never seen a program depending on it but Affninity does for some good reasons), and if you might have a tweaked Windows setup (performance wise), or programs like TuneUp, kaspersky etc. modified the setup, you will have to force Aero to start again in order to get Designer working.

 

The following should fix the problem as long as your graphics capable to run Aero:

1. Open Registry Editor (RegEdit).
2. Navigate to the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM
3. 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.
4. In the right details pane, create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value named UseMachineCheck, and set its value to 0.
5. In the right details pane, create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value named Blur, and set its value to 0.
6. In the right details pane, create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value named Animations, and set its value to 0.
7. 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
8. net start uxsms
9. Attempt to enable and apply Windows Aero in Windows 7. Restart the computer if required.

Make sure to switch the Desktop appearance (Right-click a blank part of the desktop and choose Personalize) to some default Aero Theme, then you can apply your wallpaper again and start to enjoy Affinity.

 

Hope that helps some Win7 users.

 

Cheers and happy designing! :)

[wbriers]

Wow! It worked!  Thanks!!!

I don't know why transparency was unavailable in the first place on my machine... was driving me crazy.

 

WIN7 Home Premium

Nvidia GTX470