On many blogs and forums, you may get to read a tip on how to improve performance! If you disable the Aero interface, it will improve the performance of your Windows operating system!
Does disabling Aero improve performance or is it a myth?
Now it is very important to understand one thing! The Aero interface is rendered by the graphics card in your computer. The UI is offloaded onto the graphics card. But if you switch to the non-Aero viz Classic theme, then the UI is offloaded to and handled by your computer’s main processor! This may in fact put more load on your main processor and have the opposite effect; although on today’s modern computers, the difference will be imperceptible, really. Even if you have integrated graphics, you may not see any real difference in performance. In a study commissioned by Microsoft during Vista days, it was found that: You should therefore not disable Aero, expecting a boost in Windows performance. Sure, if you wish to prolong your battery, go ahead and disable Aero. But if you indeed wish to boost performance, you may want to consider disabling transparency and special effects instead! Says Lee Whittington: However, Shyam Sasindran has a slightly different view point: I did the test with:
Aero and Transparency OnAero and Transparency OffAero Off
There was only maybe at the most a 10 minute difference in between each Theme I chose. I had IE running the same thing during each test along with a couple of other programs in the background. I really didn’t see any change in how it drained the battery for each test. The only major change I saw was if I switched my Power Scheme to High Performance with a few tweaked settings. I lost 2 and a half hours of battery life! What do you think!? Your comments? Observations? Experience? Again Aero is a feature for powerful machine and not for a Computer that just touches minimum requirements. Not all GPU card supports Aero. The software that I support at my Office i.e. Sage ACT!, when Aero is enabled on a slow machine, it take 15 to 20 seconds to open. But when we disable Aero and other animations (i.e. the one that we can find under “System Properties | Advance settings | Advance Tab | Visual effects | Adjust for best performance) it take 5 to 10 seconds to load the program. This is on a slow PC i.e. 1 GB RAM etc. This is my view about this topic. This is purely based on my experience on PC not theoretically written anywhere.
