Set "Adjust for best performance" for all users

I would not go that far as Aero overhead is not that high and it really makes the beauty of the OS. And if you don't have or use Aero then Basic is still better than the file cabinet grey Win2000 theme you get if you uncheck "Use Visual Syles on Windows and Buttons." You lose all style, go plug ugly.

On lower resource (>4gb RAM and/or weaker CPU) hardware I uncheck fading, sliding, animation, selection rectangle, and dragging intact which are not noticeable anyway (Why would you care if the words stay intact in a box while you're dragging it? )

If that isn't enough upgrade your RAM, CPU, or buy a new PC to really enjoy the once-in-a-lifetime beauty and instantaneous performance of native Win7.

Then make these changes for each User. Someone may know how to do it in Group Policy if you have higher than Home Premium version.

Actually, the overhead of Aero is nil, compared to Aero Basic or Classic. Aero unlike the other two runs completely on the GPU. The other two are solely CPU bound. If your computer can run Aero you should use it, it offers the best performance.

The perceived slowness of Aero is not actually Aero being slow rather its the animations that add a delay. Turn those off and everything is instant.

Without Aero, my dinky underpowered Atom netbook would be awful.

rxd said:

Is it possible to make Windows 7 use the "Adjust for best performance" option under Visual Effects for every user that has a logon to a pc?

Thanks

Simple answer no. These are user profile specific. Just like default programs.

rxd said:

Yes, I want to do this. Believe me we have our reasons....

Could you explain what those reasons are?

   Warning

The following will lower performance, not increase it!

OK fine, I will give you the dirty way of doing it...but I do not like it....


If you change the themes service to manual startup and restart, it will disable all eye candy and everything. The themes service will not run, so changing themes under personalization will still be possible as the service can then start itself. Nothing at all that involves visual effects will run. If you disable it, the themes service cannot be started in any way shape or form. But it may cause system instability.

rxd said:

I don't know what the big deal is as to the why of this. Ok, if you really want to know, we are experiencing issues with our pc's that performance is becoming terrible. Going into task manager and looking under performance I am seeing 50% cpu usage even with nothing running. Don't bother saying virus because we are not even connected to the internet or anything. I can see right away that Desktop Composition is one of the chief culprits. Disabling this usually completely fixes the problem, but not always. Sometimes the cpu usage will drop from 50% to around 20%, most of the time it will drop from 50% to 1%. What always works is setting setting the Adjust for Best Performance option. This always drops cpu usage down to 1%. I suspect it was a windows update that has caused this but I really am not sure and I don't have either the time or desire to try to experiment uninstalling and re-installing a ton of windows updates in the hope of finding the culprit, if that even is the problem. Especially when setting adjust for best performance always fixes the issue.

No need to get angry here.

I do not see how that would happen unless you have:

-a really crappy processor pentium 4 or lower
-very little ram
-tons of startup programs
-A beefy antivirus
-Just because you're not connected to the internet does not mean you are safe from malware.
-old drivers
-broken updated glitchy drivers

If you gave more details on what the hardware is, we could help.