Aero Was Efficiently Written

Principled Technologies conducted tests for Microsoft that proved Windows Aero had little effect on slowing down the performance of the computer. Information week reports that: Principled Technologies measured performance with Aero on and off using a Dell XPS M170 notebook equipped with 1 Gbyte of RAM, a 2.0-GHz Intel Pentium M 750 single-core processor, and a graphics card with 256 Mbytes of memory. The laptop’s configuration met or exceeded Microsoft’s own minimum system requirements for what it calls a “Vista Premium Ready PC,” which is a system with sufficient horsepower to run Aero. Those requirements, for example, specify a graphics card with at least 128 Mbytes of memory.

Aero in itself was probably written in a way that it doesn’t consume unnecessary resources that slow down the pc; but Aero in itself is resource thirsty enough to make your PC slow. Anyways, disabling Aero is possible for low powered PCs, but why would you do that? Don’t get a Vista if you are going to disable the interface anyway.

Source here.