I got Vista on my new laptop abut 6 months ago. I had been hearing the horror stories for the previous year or so and just assumed Vista to be this incredibly bad OS with nothing more then a superficial new theme.

However even after 3 days of troubleshooting (including my computer randomly being identified as a pirate copy) I was beginning to like Vista. Sure many of the features may seen to be small additions, but I assure you that after using Vista for some time you will hate going back to XP.

Anyway the point of this was that at first Vista did seem to be very slow. It instantly confirmed my suspicions about the resource hogging accusations, and I promptly Googled some tips to speed things up.

What I got was recommendations from IT ‘guru’s everywhere to turn off all the fancy Vista effects as it slowed down the system. These new graphics were also blamed for eating battery life and almost every other thing wrong with Vista.

However with time I soon realised that the graphic effects have no effect whatsoever on battery life or the performance of Windows. There are some sure-fire ways to speed things up such as unselecting the “highlight new programs” option in the start menu, limiting the number of processes starting with Windows and making sure your system is fully indexed. However Aero has no noticeable effect.

When you first begin using Vista it will be slow, but that is, among other reasons, because Windows is still allocating files to RAM for quick access and creating thumbnails and all that jazz for the first time. I assure you that with time Vista responds fine for normal everyday usage. I can’t say the same for gaming performance however as I don’t play high performance games. However the few I do play run fine.

I challenge someone to actually prove that the Aero interface has any connection with battery life or performance.