Comment by kozmikyak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kozmikyak | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why the article considers the only two possible options as "Metro" and "Aero". I'd go for "Classic". I still set my Windows boxes to that style immediately after install, along with separately turning off most other visual enhancements in the System control panel.

I'm not a complete luddite; I know that on a modern system Aero is not going to have a terrible effect on performance, and that UI elements can be customized, and that I like some of the Windows 7 enhancements to the taskbar and start menu. But the visual style of Aero is just extra visual distraction.

I can see the point of using GPU to accelerate the UI, but there should always be an option of minimal visual distraction.

Good news for you: With windows 8 DWM is a core system component which you can not even kill it from Task Manager or disable it with Services.msc. You can say "where is the good news?" here it is: Shake, snap, preview, peek and all other aero features are enabled for you even you GPU is not very capable for them. It falls back to software based rendering if your GPU is not capable.

Instead of disabling Aero, I just installed a custom theme and turned off all the transparency. I too found Aero to be too much of visual distraction; too many different colored elements with no consistency.

However, a subtle Aero theme is a considerable improvement of classic.

Goto ctrl pnl->system->advanced->performance

Select manage best performance (ie remove all the features) then turn back on the bottom 4 options. It gives you almost all the aero look but without the CPU/memory load

Honestly, the CPU/Memory load is pretty minimal and disabling Aero for performance on a modern machine is micro-optimization at best.

Unless you are running CUDA or openGL shader code, then anything that uses a GPU function brings you to a halt.

It took us a long time to work out why we getting crappy performance on some people's machines when the dev's with identical hardware were doing fine. Aero transparency does terrible things to the texture memory

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