Install Windows 2000?

Hehe, well that would be going a bit extreme but it does remind me you could set XP to look like 2000.

How about just choosing Windows classic theme?

IIRC, if you don't use Aero and revert to classic then the desktop will actually be slower since GDI/DirectDraw are no longer accelerated in Vista+.

Not sure if MS changed this in 7 but in Vista it was pretty amusing to see people turn of Aero for the supposed speed difference.

I'm sure everyone will agree that Windows classic theme is terrible!

i dunno aero used pixel shaders if you had a slow onboard gpu it would matter plus the memory hit would mean more swapfile usage

DosFreak wrote:

IIRC, if you don't use Aero and revert to classic then the desktop will actually be slower since GDI/DirectDraw are no longer accelerated in Vista+.

Not sure if MS changed this in 7 but in Vista it was pretty amusing to see people turn of Aero for the supposed speed difference.

On the other hand, if you disable Aero you can also disable the "Desktop Window Manager Session Manager" service (UxSms) and you will gain a few CPU cycles and a bit more RAM. If you're using a laptop you'll probably also gain some minutes of battery life.

We would need some benchmarks to get real data, but I suspect that using the classic theme won't make your PC noticeably slower. (I do use the classic theme myself and didn't notice any slow down)

Regards.

The loss of GUI acceleration is not going to increase your battery life. The CPU will use more power than a graphics chip doing the drawing. One aspect to maximizing battery life is keeping the CPU idle as much as possible.

I thought that part of the idea of Aero was to offload more of the burden of the GUI from the CPU to the GPU, since outside things like game play the GPU usually has very little load.

Aero is just a GUI that uses 3D acceleration instead of the old GDI acceleration ways. It's mostly about more shiny, but there are some new goodies such as better video playback quality in some cases.

If you think GDI wasn't accelerating much, try your hand at some XP without display drivers installed. The standard display driver uses VESA and will give you a nice selection of resolutions and color depths but there's no acceleration.

I was remembering when Vista was still in development I had read about that they were reworking the graphical subsystem of Windows which did this, moving away from the old GDI. It was codenamed "Avalon". I had made the assumption that Aero was the result of this.

Way off topic... Aero was 'nothing more' than a bunch of visual styles and presentation values. Avalon was the in development name for WPF which sounded great until the reality was that the platform simply doesn't use it. Some stuff was added to GDI (which now sports a '+' after the name) but it's all pretty much as it has always been.

Roll on a world where MS see sense and leave the baggage behind 😀

So, just for clarification, which of the following configurations do you think would give better battery life?

Config 1:
- Windows 7 with Classic Theme
- Aero DISABLED
- Uxsms service DISABLED
- latest nvidia drivers INSTALLED (and supposedly providing only 2D GDI acceleration)

Config 2:
- Windows 7 with Windows 7 Basic Theme
- Aero DISABLED
- Uxsms service DISABLED
- latest nvidia drivers INSTALLED (and supposedly providing only 2D GDI acceleration)

Config 3:
- Windows 7 with Windows 7 Aero Theme
- Aero ENABLED
- Uxsms service ENABLED
- latest nvidia drivers INSTALLED (and supposedly providing both 2D and 3D GDI acceleration)

Let's also suppose the laptop has an Intel Core i5 430M CPU and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 325M videocard.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gt_325m_us.html

EDIT: I've found this in wikipedia, but I'm not sure how accurate it is the info:

Windows Vista In Windows Vista, all Windows applications including GDI and GDI+ applications run in the new compositing engine, […]
Show full quote

Windows Vista
In Windows Vista, all Windows applications including GDI and GDI+ applications run in the new compositing engine, Desktop Window Manager which is built atop the Windows Display Driver Model. The GDI render path is redirected through DWM, and GDI is no longer hardware-accelerated by the video card driver. However, due to the nature of desktop composition (internal management of moving bitmaps and transparency and anti-aliasing of GDI+ being handled at the DWM core), operations like window moves can be faster or more responsive because underlying content does not need to be re-rendered by the application.

Windows 7
Windows 7 includes GDI hardware acceleration for blitting operations. This improves GDI performance using new features in the Windows Display Driver Model v1.1. This allows the DWM engine to use local video memory for compositing, thereby reducing system memory footprint and increasing the performance of graphics operations. Most primitive GDI operations are still not hardware-accelerated, unlike Direct2D. As of November 2009, both ATI and Nvidia have released WDDM v1.1 compatible video drivers.
GDI+ will continue to rely on software rendering in Windows 7.

The Desktop Window Manager is a Compositing window manager, each program has a buffer that it writes data to, the DWM then composites each program's buffer into a final image, compared to the stacking window manager in Windows xp and earlier (and Windows 7 and Vista with aero disabled) which has each program writing to the same main buffer.

The last paragraph leads me to think that when you disable the UxSms service you will be getting the same behaviour that was present in Windows XP. It makes sense, because you are basically disabling the whole Desktop Window Manager. So Windows needs to fallback to something else in order to draw the screen!

Regards.

There is no GDI acceleration in Vista+. (IIRC WDDM 1.1 changed this somewhat but disabling DWM would negate that)

You should be able to check in dxdiag what driver model you have.

As for Aero on battery supposedly there's an option to disable it when you switch to battery, doesn't matter anyway since there isn't much of a difference for battery life.

The last paragraph leads me to think that when you disable the UxSms service you will be getting the same behaviour that was present in Windows XP. It makes sense, because you are basically disabling the whole Desktop Window Manager. So Windows needs to fallback to something else in order to draw the screen!

It will still render but it will not be accelerated, so no not the same behavior at all.

DosFreak wrote:

It will still render but it will not be accelerated, so no not the same behavior at all.

You're right, DosFreak. I was erroneously assuming that Windows 7 reverted to the old behaviour of WinXP, but that's clearly not the case.

It's explained very well here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2d-window … gdi,2547-2.html

I've also run their 2D Benchmark: http://www.tomshardware.de/download/Tom2D,0301-26150.html

And I've discovered, much to my dismay, that selecting the "Classic Theme" automatically DISABLES the Desktop Window Manager (regardless of the status of the Uxsms service).

That's why my 2DBench scores immediately drop by more than 30% when I enable the "Classic Theme", and the CPU usage shoots up by an even wider margin.

In other words, disabling Aero DOES make my computer slower!

Damn, this puts me in a very uncomfortable position. The Classic Theme is much more aesthetically pleasing to my eyes (for some strange reason I find the transparency of windows very distracting and annoying) but it comes with a sizeable performance hit as a drawback.

Gosh, I don't know what to do now! I'll try to find some way to tweak the Aero Theme to make it less annoying so I can keep its performance boost.

Regards.

You can try increasing the color intensity of the windows, which has the effect of reducing the transparency.

And directly above the Color Intensity setting is an option to disable transparency without disabling aero.

Thanks, I've done just that. It's much more bearable now.

But deep in my heart I still miss the Classic Theme, though. Gosh, I would even use the Windows 3.1 theme if I could! 😀

Kind regards.

Hotdog I bet 😁