Quick question about Vista GUI.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

Hey all,

The ol' lady is about to buy a laptop and it comes with Vista on it.

We both run XP on our PC's and we both hate XP's Playskool/Fisher-Price interface. Fortunately, there are a lot of options to change XP's GUI.
You'd be hard pressed to tell our PC's weren't running Win2K. Not only is the pared-down interface more familiar to us, but it also makes things run faster (who doesn't want better performance? Even if it is only a little bit.).

Are the options available in Vista to 'strip down' the GUI and make it look/run/interface more like Win2K or even XP?

Just wanna know what we're getting ourselves into.

TIA!!

[Ai Haibara]

Well, not like XP, I believe. But there is an option (I think they call it "Windows Classic," or something like that - I'm not on our Vista system at the moment, so I can't check right now), to change the desktop so that it'll look much like the pre-XP interface... more like Win9X/ME, maybe NT/2K, but I never used NT/2K, so I'm not sure.

Of course, not using Aero and using the Classic interface'll probably speed things up quite a bit...

[redwudz]

You can change the 'Theme' to 'Windows Classic' and it will mostly resemble XP. But it seems a bit of a waste. I like the graphics. XP or W2000 seem kind of dull and lifeless after Vista Aero.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

I think we're both a lot more utilitarian than most 'modern' PC users...

[JohnnyMalaria]

Vista's "Windows Standard" and "Windows Classic" themes closely resemble W2K. They are virtually identical.

Certainly no kindergarten XP theme - thankfully.

Screenshot:

[Xylob the Destroyer]

That's awesome. Thanks JohnnyMalaria!
Any performance improvement worth mentioning?

[JohnnyMalaria]

np.

Do you mean improvement by switching to the simpler schemes?

If so, switching off Aero can release up to approx. 5% CPU time. The more activity on the desktop, the more Aero has to do such as creating live thumbnails for each application's task bar entry. Glass doesn't use much CPU time. Also, DirectDraw is used for graphics (Aero uses D3D), so legacy apps may perform better, too.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

good deal. thanks!

[RabidDog]

Windows Vista, Lutheran edition?