I realise it's not something your interested in but I think allot of your customers might like to have the option, especially those who are big on skinning like the thousands of members on my site and DeviantArt, allot of those feel the same as me and stick with Windows 7 or 8 because of the more customizable features, at the moment those who want to customize the taskbar use SiB to make the taskbar transparent and then use an old program called Taskbar Color Effects add a single large image or a smaller tiled one, this sort of works but it's a very limited implementation as it ads the image as a background so windows are on top of it and it's a bit buggy. There are some enhancements Windows taskbar utterly lacks which I would like to see, so I hope we would see some. Most taskbar drawing is now hardcoded and not so easy to change. Learn more at 's an interesting area to dig in, however skinning just for sake of skinning is not my cup of tea. Shawn "Cmdr" Keene | Microsoft MVP - Windows Insider | | tweet: Microsoft MVPs are independent experts offering real-world answers. If it solves the issue, please click Propose as Answer. (XP used GDI, which is why turning off the themes gave you better performance. If you have a powerful computer with a decent graphics card, Aero will give you much better performance. Mode), the OS would have to ask the application to 're-draw itself' every time, which is why dragging a window around without Aero on causes lag and those weird trails when under heavy load. This way, when you move a window (or maximize one), your CPU and the application itself never even know about it! In the old days (GDI desktop processing, which is used in basic/classic Did you know that Aero lets your computer perform better than basic/classic? In fact, to get the most speed: just turn off transparency but leave Aero on.Īero uses your video card to store the image of every running application.