PC Mechanic, New Article

Does Disabling Aero Really Improve Performance In Windows 7?

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 10:00 AM PST

The title of this tip is taken from a recent post The Windows Club which addresses this very question. The article is short and sweet and a recommended read for anyone who has ever pondered this question.

To get right to the “meat” of it:

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 on to 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 your main processor and have the opposite effect; although on today's modern computer's, the difference will be imperceptible, really!
Even if you have an integrated graphics, you may not see any real difference in performance!

Extensive use of exclamation marks aside (after all, this isn’t that exciting), I had never considered this. I knew 2000/XP used CPU cycles to perform the fade effect they used so I figured Aero did the same thing.

On the other hand, disabling Aero could save you a little bit of battery life:

I did the test with:
Aero and Transparency On
Aero and Transparency Off
Aero Off
There was only maybe at the most a 10 minute difference in between each Theme I chose.

And it could also save you a bit of memory usage:

Disabling Aero could improve the performance because the dwm.exe (Desktop Windows Manager) takes up 28-58000k memory usage. When we disable Aero i.e go back to classic mode, you will find a performance difference. Not huge though! Because it releases 58K of your Memory space. And the animation that gets disabled when we disable Aero will impact in loading Menus faster.

Overall, I wouldn’t really take either of these into consideration considering any modern machine which is designed to run Windows 7 will have the type of hardware where you wouldn’t even notice any of these tweaks. So based on what I have read here the performance hit is just about negligible, so just go with what you like best.

If you have any comments or observations regarding Aero/non-Aero performance, please share.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Does Disabling Aero Really Improve Performance In Windows 7?