Sorry again if I gave the wrong impression in my comments above. And, when doing processor intensive actions, and aero is still sucking down 5-10% of your CPU, it does get annoying.

I guess it all depends on what your computer needs are. Games needs are much different than number crunching needs, especially since most of them are GPU driven these days. Also it sucking down 60+ MB of ram is a bitch since it never gets paged out, and working with large datasets, every mb counts.

I do appreciate your take on it, but I wouldn’t call it a ‘myth’ ;)

Aero does use about 30mb more RAM, but it also speeds up your display. The composer of Aero itself is a performance boost, and working with WDDM it provides other mechanisms that improve performance, like assisting GDI/GDI+ and WPF on screen drawing.

Go look at some serious ‘performance reviews’, even games when running in a Window with Aero on usually run a few FPS faster than with Aero off.

Sure it is eye candy, but it is also the whole composer and acceleration portion of the Vista WDDM video subsystem.

Please, kill this myth and stop telling people to turn it off to speed up their computer.

If you really hate the animations, turn them off. If you hate the transparency, turn it off as well, but don’t turn off Aero/DWM.

Well, in theory readyboost should benefit all users regardless of how they use their computer. I’ve read varying reports, but all have shown some improvment. I’ve yet to figure out if it is based on the drives they are using as many flash drives are absolute shite. I did mention that point however.

UAC.. turning down the screen blanking has no effect on security, but for me, I see the screen quite often due to my own computer usage. So, for me, it is frustrating to have my whole screen blank, wait a while, then come back… not performance per say, but usability of the computer as well as overall productivity increase. If a user never sees UAC messages, then you are right, it has questionable increases on performance.

Of course, the same would go for almost any tweak out there.. if its for a part of the system you do nto use, it is of no benefit.

I have not used UAC tweaker.. what all does it do that cannot be done via the management tool?

What I really have difficulties with is that some tips are probably ways to speed up Vista for you but many users would not say they are. Talking about UAC and Readyboost.

btw, do you know UAC Tweaker ?

I can see reservations on #1, but getting rid of the screen blanking is fairly harmless, and on some computers takes like 10 seconds to do..

Readyboost? You have issues with readyboost? Bah..

And fixing the indexing service? What possible issue could there be with that?

9 is just smart computer usage. No program needs a ‘quick launcher’ to run all the time when superfetch does it natively already. Its double overkill. ;)

10 isn’t a tweak, but its completely harmless, and if you have 2 screens, its better than paying for a $30 program to do it for you.