How in the Tech

Enable and Disable Vista’s Aero Quickly

By Adam Myers ⋅ February 6, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Vista

While Vista’s Aero look is pretty to gaze at, it’s not for everyone. It goes without saying that the effect is not free, at least as it pertains to your system resources. Aero uses more memory and more CPU cycles than Windows last generation interface. All this adds up to increased battery usage on laptops and overall decreases in performance for memory and CPU intensive operations.  The sledge hammer approach would be to just disable Aero across the board, sticking with the look and feel of Windows 95. Thankfully, we don’t have to be that drastic if we are only interested in squeezing out every last bit of performance in specific situations. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as it should be – enabling or disabling Aero quickly and on demand. With a bit of registry magic, one is able to provide a quick toggle option when right-clicking on the desktop.

1. Click Start and in the Start Search box type regedit.exe.
2. Traverse the Registry Editor navigation tree on the left hand side down to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\Shell.



3. Right-click on Shell and select New->Key. Title the key Aero Enable. Then, right-click on the key you’ve just created and create a New->Key called command.



4. With the newly created command key selected, double click on the (Default) and assign it a value of Rundll32 dwmApi #102.



5. Repeat step 3 and 4, titling the key Aero Disable and assigning (Default) to Rundll32 dwmApi #104.



6. Now right-click on your Desktop and see the two new options you’ve created: Aero Enable and Aero Disable. Selecting either option triggers just what the name implies.