Windows 7 and Vista users may be familiar with the Aero interface, which provides a variety of visual effects to make the operating system look more polished. However, if you don’t need Aero, you can disable it easily. To disable Aero on Windows 7 or Vista:

  1. Open the Start menu and click Control Panel.
  2. Under “Appearance and Personalization,” click Personalization.
  3. Under “Aero,” click Change settings for Aero mode (if it’s not already selected).
  4. In the “Aero” window, under “Display options,” select either Basic or Standard (depending on your needs). Click OK to close the window. ..

Disabling Aero in Windows 8

If you’re trying to disable Aero in Windows 8, you’ll be interested to know that there’s no reason to, because they’ve disabled the Aero transparency theme by default anyway.

So there’s no point in bothering for Windows 8 or 8.1.

Disabling Aero for Windows 7

First, you’ll want to right-click on the desktop and choose Personalize from the menu.

Then you can simply scroll the themes down until you see the Basic themes.

Disabling Aero on Windows Vista

You might also have some performance reasons for disabling it… to do so, just right-click on the desktop and choose Personalize. Click the “Window Color and Appearance” link:

Then in the next screen, click the link near the bottom for “Open classic appearance properties for more color options”

Now you should be able to disable Aero altogether by choosing Windows Vista Basic in this screen: