One of the cool features of Windows 7 is that the taskbar shows a nifty thumbnail preview of a window when you hover over it. So if you have several Internet Explorer windows open, you can now see a preview of all the IE windows instead of just seeing descriptions.

windows 7 taskbar previewSource: Smaier.net

That’s really cool, but when I first installed Windows 7 RC1 onto my computer, my thumbnails previews were not working. All I was getting were text descriptions!

no taskbar preview windows 7

 

So that kind of sucks! No thumbnail previews on the Windows 7 taskbar! After tinkering around for a while, I learned that I had to enable Aero by updating the Windows Experience Index.

If it’s not been run before, after you rate your computer, if you have a score higher than 3, Aero will automatically be enabled. If it’s below 3, you will have to either upgrade your video drivers or upgrade your video card.

You can get to the Windows Experience Index dialog in Windows 7 by going to Control Panel, clicking on System and Security, and then clicking on Check the Windows Experience Index.

windows 7 experience index rating

On my copy, my rating had not been established yet for WMI. Click the Rate this computer button to get a score from 1 to 7.9. 

windows 7 experience index

 

If it’s less than 3, you’re out of luck. Unfortunately, Windows 7 Aero requires a higher version of DirectX than previous versions of Windows. If you’re running Windows 7 in a virtual environment like VMWare, Virtual PC 2007, or VirtualBox, you will not be able to enable the Aero feature in Windows 7.

I’ve heard there is a registry hack out there to enable Aero in Windows 7, but I don’t think it’s worked for many people so I won’t mention it here!