Power consumption and Vista's Aero Interface
Our friends at the Tech Report have an interesting article on-line tonight (or this morning depending on where you're from!) investigating the effect Windows Vista's Aero interface has on power consumption. As most of you probably know by now, Aero required a DX9 class video card to render properly, so even while sitting at the desktop your GPU is being put to use...
In TR's quick tests, it appears enabling the Aero interface doesn't effect power consumption all that much. It would be interesting to see if power consumption with Aero scales differently at excessively high resolutions versus classic mode though, because the Aero interface reportedly requires much more frame buffer memory than the classic interface as resolutions increase. Ehh...one more thing to try out when I get around to installing Vista!