I was messing around the other day and made some changes just for the heck of it. I went with the Windows Standard and adjusted my background color to my liking. It sure does make one heck of a difference in the performance of things.
I don't have a powerful gaming laptop or anything, but it sure has enough power to run everything on 64 Bit W7 just fine. It almost feels like enabling all the pretty eye candy inserts this little bottleneck. Try it for a little bit and you will see what I am talking about. It's kinda like going old school
If you do a little reading into what Aero is and how it works...you'll soon find out why turning it off doesn't yield any performance gains...quite the opposite, if there's any change at all.
Usually what slows Aero down at least what makes it appear to be slow is the animations. They cause small delays to play the animation smoothly. While on Classic the animations are rough and quick.
My Computer
Computer type
PC/Desktop
Computer Manufacturer/Model Number
Alienware Aurora ALX R4
OS
Windows 10 Pro (x64)
CPU
Intel Core i7-3930K (3.2GHz - 4.5GHz)
Motherboard
Alienware Aurora-R4 x79
Memory
4x Samsung 4GB PC3-12800 DDR3 (16GB 1600MHz)
Graphics Card(s)
Nvidia Geforce GTX 690
Sound Card
SteelSeries Siberia Elite
Monitor(s) Displays
Dell UltraSharp U3011
Screen Resolution
2560x1600
Hard Drives
Samsung 850 Pro 256 GB, Seagate 1TB Desktop Hybrid HDD, 2x Western Digital 4TB Green HDD
PSU
875W Some Dell PSU <.<
Case
Alienware Aurora ALX
Cooling
Custom Liquid Cooling (EK CPU & GPU blocks) dual EK 480RAD
Keyboard
Logitech G710+ Mechanical
Mouse
Logitech G700s
Internet Speed
Verizon Fios (50 mbps average)
Other Info
Server: Intel NUC D54250WYK: i5-4250U, 16GB, 256 GB mSATA, Windows Server 2012 R2
Same here. I ran Windows 7 on a Dell Latitude D610. It was pretty quick with a 2GHz Pentium M and 2GB DDR2 but looked like garbage with the plain interface, no Aero at all.