Are You Ready for Vista Graphics?: Page 4 of 8

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Here's the window selector in Windows Vista Basic. The 3D graphics are gone, as are the thumbnail renderings of the windows. You get a row of static icons:

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One step further down, and the feature disappears entirely: Windows Standard and Windows Classic don't include the window selector at all.

"Even hardware that doesn't have the Premium logo may run Aero," said Fear. "Your system may not be that fast, say, so when you install you don't get Aero by default." But you can still turn it on yourself in the Control Panel and at least try it. "If it won't run well and you turn it on," he said, "you'll probably see slow performance."

The reason performance slows is actually a feature of Vista, not a bug. "Vista is very scalable," said Makedon. "The better the graphics hardware you have in your PC, the better Aero will run. If you've got a high-end graphics card in your system you can open 20, 30, even 50 windows and move them around." But if you've got a less-than-capable graphics card then the CPU will kick in to help out -- a feature of WDDM. But, said Makedon, "because it's sharing system memory with the graphics you'll hit performance problems pretty quickly."

Is Your PC Ready For Vista?
If you're wondering how well your PC might run Vista, and whether or not your video card is ready for Aero, Fear recommended Microsoft's Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, a test program you can download and run on your machine. Note: The Upgrade Advisor runs only in Internet Explorer, and only on Windows XP. Microsoft's reasoning for the XP limitation is that XP is the only version you can upgrade to Vista. If you're running any other version of Windows you must do a clean install.