Rather, it was built to showcase all the features Microsoft
included with the product to help sell it.
Fortunately, there are a bunch of things you can do right now to speed
things up without spending a dime.
Tame Mindless Animation and Display Effects
Windows Vista animates almost every visual component that makes up its
sparkling new interface. While these affectations may be cute, they create
two performance problems. For one, they slow down the motion, causing
windows, menus, and listboxes to take longer to open and close, all of
which makes your PC feel sluggish. Second, they consume CPU cycles that
would otherwise be used to handle processor-intensive tasks like virtual
memory and gameplay.
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 Vista 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 5-1, contains
20 settings, all explained later.
206 | Chapter 5: Performance
Unfortunately, the four selections above the list are a bit misleading. For
example, the Let Windows choose what??™s best for my computer option
reverts all settings to the defaults chosen by a marketing committee at
Microsoft to best showcase Vista??™s features.
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