Despite fears to the contrary, a North Carolina technology assessment company determined that running Vista Aero (the fancy graphical UI elements) doesn't slow down your computer compared to the less graphics-intensive versions of Vista. The three key findings on Vista performance were:

1. After several common business operations, Vista was more responsive after rebooting as compared to Windows XP
2. Generally, Vista and XP were equally responsive on most test operations
3. Aero had little to no negative effect on the responsiveness of Vista

More responsive after boot? Equally responsive on most applications? Little effect on responsiveness? Wow. That totally doesn't jive with everything else we've been hearing. Maybe Microsoft did something right with Vista after all? – Jason Chen

Study: Aero user interface has little effect on performance [Ars Technica]

Contact information for this author is not available.