Vista - why is "adjust for best performance" so slow?

[ShawnD1]

On a quest to cut down some fat and improve system performance, I tried the "best performance" option where it turns off Aero, animations, shadows, and transparency. You'd think that would make things faster, but the exact opposite happened. The computer became virtually unusable. Things scroll incredibly slow. Explorer takes forever to open. It's so slow that I'd swear the computer was broken if I didn't know better.

I changed it back to "best appearance" and the problem fixed itself. Things scroll properly, windows don't take forever to switch or minimize, Explorer opens right away, etc. Why does this happen?

 

[MrChad]

The Aero interface is supposed to leverage your GPU for rendering. Disable it and now your CPU has to do a lot more work rendering the desktop, much like it did in pre-Vista days. That's my understanding, anyway.

 

[Nothinman]

Yea, disabling Aero puts more work back on the CPU but it shouldn't become unusable unless you somehow still had glass, animations, etc enabled but not being offloaded to the GPU. You may have just needed to reboot after making that change, it is still Windows after all...

 

[ShawnD1]

Interesting. If Aero is using the video card to do its thing, does that mean Aero (theoretically) uses less system memory as well? The video card has a lot of its own memory it could use for that.

 

[Itchrelief]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
Interesting. If Aero is using the video card to do its thing, does that mean Aero (theoretically) uses less system memory as well? The video card has a lot of its own memory it could use for that.

I think in Win7 it may use less, but I would doubt it in Vista, as Vista keeps 2 copies, one in system memory. There was a thread yesterday or so about it.

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: MrChad
The Aero interface is supposed to leverage your GPU for rendering. Disable it and now your CPU has to do a lot more work rendering the desktop, much like it did in pre-Vista days. That's my understanding, anyway.

Wow this expains everything-- why classic mode is so much more sluggish than XP.