Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Tame Mindless Animation and Display Effects

Windows 7 animates almost every visual component that makes up its sparkling interface. While these affectations may impress the kids, they create two performance problems. For one, they slow down the motion of visual elements, causing windows, menus, and listboxes to take longer to open and close, all of which makes your PC feel sluggish even when it isn't. Second, they consume CPU cycles that would otherwise be used to open applications, generate icon previews in Windows Explorer, load complex web pages, and handle processor-intensive tasks.

There are settings that affect performance scattered throughout Windows, but the ones that control display effects are the easiest to change, and go the furthest to make Windows feel faster and more responsive.

In Control Panel, open System, and click the Advanced system settings link on the left side (or run SystemPropertiesAdvanced.exe). In the Performance section, click Settings. The Visual Effects tab, shown in Figure below, contains 20 settings, all explained later.

The Performance Options window is a good place to start looking for fat to trim

Now, depending on the prowess of your video hardware, some of these settings may make more of a difference than others.

Animate controls and elements inside windows
Turn this off to nix the slow-fade effect on buttons and tabs in dialog boxes, the cyclic pulsating effect on the default button, and the fading scrollbar arrows. Buttons will still glow blue as you roll over them with the mouse, but they'll do it sans the delay.

Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing
This controls the squeezing and stretching that happens to windows when you minimize, restore, and maximize them. Leave it on to see where a window went when you minimize it, or turn it off to make windows pop into position when you minimize, maximize, and restore.
This option also affects the disappearing/reappearing taskbar if you have both the Auto-hide the taskbar setting in Taskbar and Start Menu Properties and the Show window contents while dragging option (described later) enabled.

Animations in the taskbar and Start Menu This controls the animated jump lists, fading task thumbnail previews, and the sliding taskbar buttons. Turn it off to speed up the taskbar. This setting was named Slide taskbar buttons in earlier versions of Windows.

Enable Aero Peek
When you hover your mouse over a taskbar button for a running application, a small preview of the window appears just above the taskbar. If you then hover the mouse over the preview, all the visible windows become translucent except for the one you're previewing. The same thing happens if you press Alt-Tab repeatedly and then hesitate on one window.
This also enables or disables the Preview desktop with Aero Peek option in the Taskbar tab of the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties window, which makes all windows translucent when you hover your mouse over the (blank) show desktop button at the far end of the taskbar so you can see the desktop.
Since this feature is only used when you hover in certain places, leaving it enabled shouldn't give you a noticeable performance hit unless you have older video hardware. Turn it off if Windows seems to stumble whenever you use Aero Peek, or if you just find it annoying.

Enable desktop composition
This vaguely named option is one of the more substantial performance drains you can adjust here, but it's required if you want the glass effect (see "Get Glass" later). Desktop composition is the behind-thescenes scheme-run by the Desktop Window Manager (DWM)-that keeps a snapshot of each open window in memory. Turn it off, and Windows draws each window directly to the screen just like XP and earlier versions did. Without it, you can't have the Glass interface or the thumbnail previews on the taskbar and Alt-Tab window, but the Windows interface will feel snappier and more responsive.

Enable transparent glass One of the few self-explanatory options here, this option is covered in "Get Glass" later in this tutorial.

Fade or slide menus into view / Fade or slide ToolTips into view Turn these options off to have menus and tooltips "snap" open; leave it on if you prefer to wait for menus to open. See the sidebar "Fade or Slide" if you leave this option enabled and wish to choose whether menus fade or slide into view.
By default, there is a short delay between the instant you click a menu and the moment the menu actually opens; see "Make Menus More Mindful" later in this tutorial to adjust this.

Fade out menu items after clicking
This imposes less of a performance drain than its companion setting, Fade or slide menus into view, but it can slow down windows nonetheless if left enabled.

Show taskbar thumbnail previews
This affects the small previews that appear when you hover your mouse over taskbar buttons for running applications; see Enable Aero Peek, earlier, for a related setting.

Show shadows under mouse pointer / Show shadows under windows
These two settings have negligible effect on the performance of most Windows 7-class PCs.

Show thumbnails instead of icons
This one affects performance in Windows Explorer more than any other. It takes a lot of processor power to open all the media files in a folder and generate thumbnail images, so if you turn it off, you'll be able to open folder windows much more quickly. Among other things, thumbnail generation is usually responsible for the slowly moving green progress bar in Windows Explorer's address bar, so you should definitely turn this off if you don't care about thumbnails for your images, videos, and PDF files.
If an installer window appears briefly or if Windows Explorer crashes each time you view a folder full of video files, it means that one of your video codecs is damaged. Turn off the Show thumbnails instead of icons option to bypass the problem, or see the section "Get Videos to Play" to fix it.

Show translucent selection rectangle
The translucent selection rectangle is what you see when you drag the mouse and make a box to select multiple files in Windows Explorer and on your desktop. It should have no discernable effect on performance, but since it uses alpha channels (an advanced function provided by your display driver), you may want to turn this off if you have an older video card or suspect a buggy display driver.

Show window contents while dragging
Turn off this option to show gray window outlines when moving and resizing windows; consider it a throwback to the early days of Windows. You probably won't notice much of a performance hit with this feature turned on, unless you're using the Glass interface on a PC with a weak graphics engine (display card). In fact, Windows may seem more responsive with this feature enabled, since it allows the interface to respond immediately to dragging and resizing.

Slide open combo boxes
This option controls the animation of drop-down listboxes, similar to the Fade or slide menus option described earlier. Turn it off to have listboxes pop open.

Smooth edges of screen fonts
Using a process called anti-aliasing, Windows fills in the jagged edges of larger text on the screen with gray pixels, making the edges appear smooth. Turn off this option to slightly improve the speed at which larger fonts are drawn on the screen, although the speed difference shouldn't be noticeable on any modern PC.
If you're using a flat-panel display (laptop or otherwise), you may find text slightly more difficult to read if font smoothing is turned on. But before you simply turn it off, try the alternate anti-aliasing method. Open the Display page in Control Panel and click the Adjust ClearType text link on the left to open the ClearType Text Tuner. Place a checkmark next to Turn on ClearType, and then click Next to find the settings that make text most readable on your display.

Smooth-scroll list boxes
Despite the fact that they don't open or close, ordinary listboxes are animated, too. If you've ever noticed a listbox that scrolls slowly, this option is the reason; turn it off to make listboxes scroll faster.
There's a nearly identical option in Internet Explorer that makes web pages scroll more slowly. In IE, click the Tools drop-down, select Internet Options, and then choose the Advanced tab. At the end of the Browsing section, turn off the Use smooth scrolling option and click OK.

Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop
This setting affects more than just the shadows behind icon captions; it makes the text background transparent. If you're using desktop wallpaper (as opposed to a solid color background), and you turn off this option, small swaths of the current solid background color will show through the captions of your desktop icons.

Use visual styles on windows and buttons
Turn off this setting to make Windows 7's interface look more or less like Windows 98/2000. Another way to accomplish this is to open the Personalization page in Control Panel and choose the Windows Classic theme.

That's it for this window; click Apply to test your changes, and then OK when you're done.

Shrink desktop icons

Next, if you've noticed that Windows has been slow to update desktop icons, and you have a lot of them, there is a setting that may help. Right-click an empty area of the desktop, select View, and then select Small icons. Your desktop icons will shrink somewhat, returned to the standard 32x32 pixel size used in earlier versions of Windows. When Windows draws larger icons- Medium Icons, the default in 7-it has to stretch most application icons to the new size, and this can take a little time on slower PCs. Of course, the icons included with Windows 7 all come in larger sizes and don't need stretching, but that doesn't apply to Internet Shortcuts and the icons for many programs and documents.

Fine-tune video settings

If you're interested in tinkering further with display settings that can affect performance, right-click an empty area of your desktop, select Screen resolution and then click the Advanced settings link.

On older PCs, the speed at which a video card can draw to your screen is somewhat dependent on the current color mode and resolution. If your games, or Windows itself, for that matter, are running slowly, try reducing the color depth and resolution. Newer high end video cards will not show any performance hit when run at higher resolutions or color depths.

In the Advanced settings window, choose the Troubleshoot tab and click the Change settings button to fine tune some of the performance features of your display driver, all of which vary with the make, model, and driver version. If the Change settings button is grayed-out, look for extra tabs in this window; any tab to the right of Color Management is a special feature of your display driver, and can be used to change video settings.

Now, most high-end video cards allow you to modify or disable certain 3D features, such as 8-bit palletized textures, gamma adjustment, zbuffer, and bilinear filter. In most cases, these settings won't have any effect on Windows outside 3D games, with the possible exception of the Flip 3D application (Winkey+Tab). But look for other features you can turn off, such as custom shortcut menus, special effects for your windows, or a virtual desktop feature, all of which may slow down your PC when enabled.