Dwight Silverman, the tech reviewer at the Houston Chronicle, has written about the impact that the Aero theme has on battery life and performance (under the provocative title "Vista, Aero, battery life . . . and Doom" -- he's referring to the game Doom3, BTW). It's a good post and I'd like to take a minute to expand on what Dwight has written.
First off, yes, as Dwight correctly points out, the Aero theme drives the GPU harder and therefore uses more power. But in the big picture, it's really not that much more. For example, the display on most laptops will consume somewhere between 15-25% of your "power budget" when you are running on battery. Nevertheless, in our testing we've seen that turning on Aero consumes only about 1-4% more of battery life. In terms of making your battery last longer, turning off Aero will not go very far while at the same time costing you some of the cool features that make Windows Vista fun to use, such as Flip 3D, taskbar previews, window transparency and so on.
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