Finally buying a shuttle.

[emmille]

turn off the stupid vista thing where it makes windows have an opacity and you will get back about 20% of that ram usage.

 

[Far]

aww. i like aero tho. it probably makes up 50% of my reasoning to use vista :P

 

[Insane]

aww. i like aero tho. it probably makes up 50% of my reasoning to use vista :P

just done a bit of reserach into aero user interface for you! Disabling aero will make nowhere near 20% reduction in usage.

taken from http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=107

The difference is small, but it's there alright. On my main Vista machine (which has a Windows Experience Index of 4.4) which is running Vista RC1 build 5600, I noticed that when I had the Aero UI theme loaded, the CPU usage hovered at around 3% and the physical memory usage at about 27%. However, with the Classic theme loaded these values dropped to 1% and 24% respectively. Not much, but there is a measurable performance hit.

Note: During these tests I had a couple of Notepad windows open along with the Windows Task Manager.

Interestingly, there's a visible drop is system demand when transparency is disabled for the Aero UI. Here the CPU usage seemed to drop from around 3% to around 2% (it didn't seem to have any effect on the physical memory used - which is as I expected).

From this we can extrapolate some basic conclusions:

* On a high-end system, the performance hit of running with the Aero UI is close to negligible
* The lower the performance of the system, the greater the Aero effect will be (in other words, the less system resources you have available, the more you're going to feel it)
* It's easy to switch between Aero and Classic

It has nothing to do with aero, refer to my previous post! Your using that much RAM due to 1) regular system running 2) your shared memory for your onboard GPU & 3) that vista allocates whatever your vram is and takes that amount again from your system ram!

 

[emmille]

thats funny, it makes a huge difference on my machine.

 

[Far]

with me using a seperate gfx card, im now only using about 20% ram on idle. which is about what i expected on vista. though it does go down to about 15% when i use the old xp theme.