Windows 7: What's you opinion on the aero interface?

I really like it, since vista, but I keep it off most of the time while I'm using my laptop without my charger, aero makes my battery last so little, is aero suppose to drain battery life so fast?, It looks great but in the end, is it worth wasting battery life for eye candy? - My Opinion -

YF

Depends on how you use it. It does use more power and if you need 4-5hours on a charge there are alot of things you can do to increase battery life.

I use it all the time

ken

What ways could help me save battery life? I check power saver on but that doesn't help a lot. Thanks for the help.

I set up my systems for performance rather than appearance. Tried Aero once when Vista was in beta - haven't even tried it since.

I also agree with TURN OFF Aero. I do not miss it at all.

i like it but always disable the animation for opening and shutting windows,but why oh why did m$ make the aero basic colour so god damn ugly ,with no option to change it

I turn off aero on my portable devices...but not on desktops. Of course,anything which places any load on the GPU is going to cause more power to be consumed and thus shorten battery life.

If you want to tweak your laptop and get more life, head over to the Power Control Center in Windows and create a custom power policy. You can do all sorts of stuff including dimming the display, reducing the speed of the CPU, shutting off things like BlueTooth and PCMCIA cards and such to maximize battery life.

For performance? I'm afraid you made the wrong choice then. Aero is ran on the GPU, which is hardly used outside of games. While every other non-aero themes are on the CPU taking a slice of the pie.

For awhile the first thing I did was turn aero off, but I read a post about how it helps with hardware acceleration, so I turned it back on and low and behold, things actually seemed to run better and windows like my movie folder of thumbnails actually rendered faster.