[RhoXS]

Although I have had a Mini 9 for almost two years now, I rarely use it because it is so slow. It has W7 installed on a 32 GB SSD and even though I have 2GB RAM, it really is not practically useful. I almost always gravitate to my bigger and heavier IBM Thinkpad because it is so much faster. I bought the Mini 9 on not much more than a whim because of its very small size and small price. Since I never really had much expectations from it, I never really gave its rediculous clunky performance much thought.

Recently I have been considereing installing XP on it thinking XP has a lower overhead and might make it perform better. Last night, on an inspiration, before I installed XP, I turned off W7 Aero graphics. I then saw an immediate and what appears to be significant improvement in performance. It boots much faster and even shuts down faster. The time it takes for a program to load is also much faster. All around my first limited impression is that it is a different machine.

This surprises me because I did not think Aero would consume any consequential overhead when there are no visible graphic demands. I hope I was wrong and my first impression is accurate.

[Sleeping_Panda]

Actually it is in fact the case that Aero will eat up a tremendous amount of resources, even on a desktop or traditional laptop. Aero is an umbrella for numerous graphical and performance 'widgets' (or I've seen the term 'eye-candy' used a lot too) which sound small but add up quickly.

Coupled with the more limited graphics handling of the various Mini's onboard graphics chips, and most users will experience a 20-40% upswing in available resources by turning Aero off, and in many cases that same majority of users will never miss the changes that turning Aero off makes.

So, no you are not imagining things...Aero vs. no Aero on my Inspiron Duo made a measurable difference in response time and function speed and I have noticed basically zero change in my general experience.

Then again, I turn Aero off on all my work machines as well. Only my gaming PC runs Aero, and on that machine, I just run it because I can

[ScottLott]

Running Aero on a netbook is like towing 5 tons with a small truck. It can do it but not well and not for very long.