How to quickly enable and disable Aero in Windows 7?

I share my screen with colleagues a lot. During sharing, it's advisable to turn off Aero as it generates much more graphics to send over the wire and causes delays in screen sharing. Some screen sharing applications actually do this for you, and some don't.

I'm looking for a quick and convenient way to switch on/off Aero on Windows 7. Ultimately, if I could tie it to a hotkey, that would be best, but any widget/tray-icon or desktop shortcut would do.

Solution 1:

Create a batch file with the following content:

@echo off
sc interrogate uxsms | find "1062"
if %errorlevel%==0 goto :sc_start
sc stop uxsms
exit

:sc_start
sc start uxsms
exit

Executing it will alternatively turn Aero on and off. You can place it anywhere you like. AFAIK it does not need to be executed as Admin.

Solution 2:

You can try:

c:\> sc stop uxsms

c:\> sc start uxsms