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We have been testing vista at IMC since may. The whole aero shell also takes up much more ram than you would expect. All of the "pretty" textures and such are all done in a pretty high resolution and depending on your settings are even presented in "HD". Most of these graphics are stored in the system cache until use. Right now after a cold boot and with only windows mail open I only have 45% of my ram available... out of 2 gigs. And the ram hog is, you guessed it dwm.exe, sidebar.exe and explorer.exe. Long and short of it, vista is a pretty looking ram hog. Although, to be fair, I do like the OS. Other than its ram usage I cant say as though I have seen many other problems. The networking setup was a pain though... Scott Cassaday Network Administrator Instructional Media Center Michigan State University 517-432-8193 [log in to unmask] ----- Original Message ----- From: Richard Wiggins To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 11:16 AM Subject: [MSUNAG] Windows Vista Aero transparency CPU costs I upgraded to Windows Vista a couple months ago because I needed to experience it in order to write about it and understand what customers are going through. My Thinkpad Z61t has been sluggish compared to running XP, something documented in the trade press. This morning I was looking at Task Manager to see what proceses were eating up CPU. A module called dwm.exe was consistently taking up 12% or so of CPU. Turns out this is the Desktop Window Manager, which handles the transparency effects and other new features such as seeing a preview of a window by mousing over its place on the Taskbar. I disabled the transparency effect and dwm.exe fell to using about 5-6% of CPU. As it happens, I can't stand the transparency effect. It makes it harder to discern the top edge of the current window and it costs a lot of CPU. Others using or deploying Vista may want to try turning it off. /rich