how improve desktop performance for windows aero

I turn off animations on OS X wherever I can, so I’ll do it on Windows, too.Ģ. Adding an animation can easily make systems feel less responsive, because they literally add a delay while the animation draws, before you get the effect you wanted (opening/closing menus, minimizing windows, etc.). Unfortunately, two things go wrong in Vista’s UI implementation:ġ. This was even running on mainstream Mac hardware before the release of Windows XP. Three-dimensional transformations, translucent texture blends, and even animations can all be performed by shader code on the graphics card without even involving the CPU. It should not require a high-end graphics card. This should mean that UI operations interfere less with CPU operations, like producing music. UI elements still have to be calculated to some extent on the CPU, but you place the processor-intensive elements of animation and translucency on the GPU. Aside from looking cooler (scalable interface elements, translucency, shiny things, flying windows), the whole point of Aero was supposed to be that most of the display processing took place on the GPU, the brain on your video card, instead of your CPU. Aero, the slick, shiny new user interface for Vista, should run more reliably than the Vista Basic UI and Windows XP. And I’m not done part of the reason I’m glad to do this on the Web is to get some of your feedback, and update these tips over time.īut let’s start with the easy one: fixing Aero. And some of them are reminiscent of similar situations on XP.ĭisclaimers: Vista is new. Fortunately, I did find some fixes I hope to find more performance enhancements, but these will definitely get you started by eliminating the bigger bottlenecks. Out of the box, I’ve already found significant issues that can make a system slow to a crawl, and was able to confirm some of these issues with others. People love to slam early adopters, but I actually like adopting early on a non-critical system, because it means when that machine is ready for a project, I won’t be troubleshooting anything. Multiple systems? New computer pre-installed with Vista? Dual-boot setup? Give it a try. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend upgrading to Vista at this time, because too many drivers are missing (hello, M-Audio), many applications still need updates, and, most importantly, graphics drivers seem still to be in flux, performing unreliably, slowly, or both (hello, NVIDIA and ATI).īut there are reasons to upgrade, as long as Vista isn’t the only bootable OS on your only system.

(It’s unscientific, so take it with a grain of salt, but this CPU graph actually did this just moving and resizing windows. Here’s what I’ve seen, plus how to turn ths crud off. Is the UI in Vista taking far too big a toll on your system? For now, under some circumstances, that seems to be the case.

How improve desktop performance for windows aero