I run my daily work load in Windows 7 inside a VMware Workstation 11.1 VM, with 3 monitors(VM using all 3 monitors in full screen mode). The graphics performance inside VM is not so fast, and quite oftenly(every hour) Windows 7 force the desktop theme to be "Basic", with a prompt of "Windows has detected that your computer's performance is slow". Actually the Basic theme does not improve VM graphics speed a bit, and I have to manually turn the theme back to Aero (because Basic theme is just ugly).
So my question is, is there a way(maybe tweak) to disable the stupid behavior of "force turning off Aero theme"?
There has been someone asking rougly the same question, but unfortunately no satisfying answer yet.
As magicandre1981 suggests, 10~20 seconds after the switching-to-Basic-theme happens, I capture GPU graph info with Process Explorer v16.01, but still seems no clue.
========== UPDATE 1 =========
Although I cannot find a way to suppress Windows' Aero-turning-off behavior, I managed to find a way to avoid it. Thanks to the first comment pointing out observing GPU info inside the VM, and I managed to increase the dedicated GPU memory to 800MB and the turning-off-Aero symptom does not appear any more, at least for recent two days.
The workaround is simple: Simply downgrade virtual machine hardware version from v11 to v10. Now I see GPU info as below:
Now my Dedicated GPU Memory is 851968K, and the "current" value goes from 110MB(initial boot up) to near 250MB(run for two days).
Although VMware Workstatoin 11.1 provides a setting to increase Graphics memory to 2GB (screenshot), I found it no help. It just increase the so called "System GPU Memory", and as you can see, my original setting for the VM was 1GB, and procexp reports only 64MB consumed. So it would be stupid to further increase it to 2GB.
So, I'm afraid VMware Workstatoin 11.1.0 has done a lame job regarding its virtual graphics hardware, maybe a very subtle problem.
Note: No manual tuning of .vmx content involved.
