don't disable Aero!

[johnsonx42]

On my system (as documented in my signature), I have found that disabling the Aero theme in Windows 7 (ie switching to Basic) will cause video tearing and slight choppiness in NPVR. This is counter-intuitive, but I have repeated the expirement several times over almost a year and found it happens every time.

I have no idea if this happens with Vista as well, but I suspect it would.

[jcjefferies]

A couple of weeks ago I had a purge of unused processes on my Vista Workstation starting with Aero, then carried the process even further on my Vista NPVR server. It saved quite a few hundred megs of memory and on the server saved me having to throw out the existing 2 x 1GB DIMMs and buy 2 x 2GB DIMMs.

I did notice the tearing you mention on my Vista server when the camera panned accross the room. I put it down to the fact that I was using the motherboard video card which uses main RAM as video RAM, which was part of the reason for reducing memory use. I did buy a video card with HDMI output for the server but had to return it as faulty.

[JimF]

On the Folding@home project, when you use a GPU to run the tasks and experience lag and stuttering on the desktop, they routinely recommend enabling Aero. It has to do with extra buffering for the video card or whatever, and works for me, though I don't use NPVR in such a way that I need it.

[hasso]

yes, I've read elsewhere some time back that enabling Aero can get rid of tearing/stuttering video... both in Vista and 7.

[hoborg]

Why someone even want to disable it?

[JimF]

Why someone even want to disable it?

To get rid of the miserable pictures and be able to see the icons on the desktop is one reason. You can accomplish a lot of jitter reduction without Aero (i.e., classic desktop) by opening:
Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\System\System Properties\Performance Options\Visual Effects, and then unchecking as many of the options as you need to in order to get rid of the lag. I don't know if that works for NPVR, but I often leave only "Smooth edge of screen fonts" checked when running Folding@home.

[widman]

If I don't disable Aero, the taskbar doesn't hide When I start NPVR.

[johnsonx42]

If I don't disable Aero, the taskbar doesn't hide When I start NPVR.

it does for me. anyone else have this problem?

[widman]

I figured it out. When I have the screen font set to 150%, the taskbar doesn't hide. If the font is set to 100% or 125%, then the taskbar will hide.

[johnsonx42]

interesting... Strange, but interesting.