Intel 82910 and 82915 Chipset Family and Windows 7 Aero

My older laptop has an ancient 82915 chipset. I know when you say I share the same sentiment with thousands of people on the internet, having troubles with this video card.

The Intel 82915 chipset is a built in graphics card for most desktop computers and laptops sold prior to the release of the dual cored computers. If we look in time, five to seven years since its release may seem to make these chipsets outdated, however the specs still say otherwise.

A Bit of History

The said Intel 915 graphics card has 128MB of VGRAM to offer. Even if it is comparably smaller than the newer GeForce and NVidia cards which span at 512 to 2 Gigabytes, Intel 82915 is still capable of rendering most graphics needs used by Windows XP in the past, and no other relevant problems were regarded as to how it would function. Having said that, most people chose to stick to their Intel 82915 although better graphics capacities came out.

However, after the release of Windows 7, a previously dealt with problem was brought to its height - Aero.

Windows Vista also had the Aero effect, and most of us already know what Aero is. For those who don't, Aero is simply an eye-candy effect with the transparencies in Windows 7 and Vista.

Intel 82910 / 82915 Chipset Family and Windows 7 Aero

According to Intel, it isn't possible to get Aero to work with Windows 7 or Vista. On the contrary, if we troubleshoot Windows 7, we get the report that Windows Aero will work with the hardware "Intel 82915" if the right WDDM drivers were installed, which brings everyone in a frenzy to find a solution.

I will tell you now that you wont find anything. Here is why.

Intel insists that the 82910/82915 chipset family doesn't have a feature called pixel shader, which is needed by Windows 7. And among other reasons, even if it can, Intel simply won't make the wddm driver for it, because Microsoft have not and will not license the hardware to be used with their operating system.

To bring you up to speed, I will tell you that this problem has been around for as long as Windows Vista. So if you just installed Windows 7, and thought there might be a solution, there is none.

The only thing you can do is buy a newer graphics card and install it to get Aero to work.

There is no way you will get Aero to work with a built in Intel 82915 graphics card.