Improving Vista performance – reduce visual ‘bling’
I was looking over a brand new Dell Studio laptop at work today and the owner was complaining bitterly about the performance of Vista on this 6 week old machine. The specs were good (4GB RAM and plenty of processor power). He was surprised how my ‘under powered’ Fujistu performed with only 2GB of RAM and a 1.2GHz processor.
All of the visual prettyness was turned on the new Dell, including the animated window motion and the Aero effects. I walked him through reducing the glitz, and it dawned on me that the ability to shut some of the unnecessary effects down was quite well hidden. Here’s how you do it:
- Open Control Panel
- In the search box (top right corner), enter ‘System’. Click on the System icon that appears in the body of the control panel.
- Click on ‘Advanced system settings’ on the left hand panel. Give Windows permission to run it.
- Click on the ‘Advanced’ tab at the top of the window that appears.
- Click on the ‘Settings …’ button in the Performance frame (the top button).
A new window titled ‘Performance Options’ will popup. Choose ‘adjust for best performance’ and then turn the following options back on:
- Enable desktop composition
- Show preview and filters in folder
- Show shadows under menus
- Show shadows under mouse pointer
- Show thumbnails instead of icons
- Show windows contents while dragging
- Smooth edges of screen fonts
- Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop
- Use visual styles on windows and buttons
The above settings will give a look very similar to what you had before, but with better performance. For ultra-fast (but basic looking), choose the ‘Best Performance’ option, but turn on ‘Smooth edges of screen fonts’.
Once these settings were applied things ran very quickly — more quickly than they really should have! I prefer to have the visual crud disabled as it doesn’t provide any extra functionality and is quite distracting. If you like the eye-candy then choose the ‘Best Appearance’ option and the computer will be back the way it was shipped.
