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I'll give it some more time to get better (because usually you know what you're saying), but I bugs me to get a new computer and see it chug when its not even on the highest setting.I meant that Vista isn't much of a resource hog in the sense that you don't need 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM, a dual core processor, and a Geforce 8800 GTS to run Vista. It was more like Vista isn't much of a resource hog in the sense that any computer you will buy in retail will run Vista (even with the new desktop compositing engine turned on) without any problems.That's usually why something is a resource hog!
You are wrong if you think that Aero is the entire reason why Vista takes a performance hit. Aero is serviced by your video graphics card and resides in the backbuffers of your video memory which would have been not used by Windows XP's old window manager anyway. Compared with the calculations that your GPU does normally in your typical PC game capable of per pixel lighting, raytracing, anti-aliasing, particle effects, volumetric lighting, etc, Aero is a drop in the bucket. I see Aero, along with Mac OS X's Quartz Compositer and X11's XGL, as an extremely efficient use of GPU and video memory when not running a graphics intensive applicaton. I'd rather my gobs of unused video memory and GPU cycles be used to render the screen rather than my precious system memory and CPU cycles doing the work. I'd rather my graphics card actually render everything it can rather than be restricted to only applications that invoke DirectX or OpenGL system calls.