what extra functionality does it offer?

Aero shake, aero peek, taskbar and alt+tab thumbnails, GPU rendering, Flip 3D (more imporantly, Switcher 2.0 to emulate Mac expose).

wow there are actually some THINGS it does apart from making window borders look like you're wearing other people's glasses??? Lemme check these out.
OK we got aero shake (single unconfigurable(?) mouse gesture), aero peek (same thing as what happens if you press win+d twice except you can still see borders of windows??), alt+tab thumbnails (dunno if they improved it but it's useless on vista. Only time an alt+tab icon+name doesnt suffice is when you have a billion instances of the same program open and that doesn't happen with browsers anymore so it's just file manager windows in which case every giant aero thumbnail looks the same anyway) GPU rendering (probably actually quite useful I guess but I'm not sure) and switcher clone (good)

So out of the 5 things 2 of them are useful as far as i can tell and the 1 of those 2 things that isn't just mac clone was done on fucking x windows like 5 years ago and everyone wrote it off because it was a stupid waste of resources. I'm not convinced. I''m gonna stick to boxes.

Also all of those things could be done without that horrible glassy shit. The fact some of those things which are apparently just window manager usability improvements are bundled into aero says to me people need to be strongarmed into using this shit. My mum loves it though, she says it's "like the computer in that movie with what's his name Tom Cruise? What's that called mark? you know the one. come on YOU KNOW" (it's minority report)

Your mom is who its for. That's all fine, but I wish that there was an XP classic theme available in 7 because turning Aero off makes everything look worse!

I think you have a point about it using the gpu instead of cpu to render stuff making a difference, I re-enabled aero and now my notebook burns about 10 watts instead of 12-13 (with the lowest possible brightness). But I do like the classic theme the best.

Aero shake is fuckin stupid

Yeah no it's a pretty decent idea but it's way too hard to get it to work even half the time. I think it's meant for people on tablets mostly... or at least that's where it works best.

yeah it's REVERSED what's your point

but a nice mister told me that it's safe

Well it's not safe you should remove it before something bad happens like a Trojan or some other malicious program slips by and takes those passwords for a ride.

Watch on youtube for 1080p.

im gonna hack ur school

Dude you totally should!

I just realized how much information you can get out of that video. Fuck. You can tell my first name, at least one of my contacts, where I live... I think that about covers it. W/e. Not like you couldn't find any of that shit by a quick google search of my original user name for GW.