Desktop composition is the
behind-the-scenes scheme??”run by the Desktop Window Manager
(DWM)??”that keeps a snapshot of each open window in memory. Turn
it off, and Vista 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 the 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 chapter.
Fade or slide menus/ToolTips into view. Turn this off to have menus and
tool tips ???snap??? open.
By default, there??™s 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 chapter, to adjust
this.
Show shadows under menus/mouse pointer. This feature has a negligible
effect on the performance of most Vista-class PCs, particularly those
with fast video cards.
208 | Chapter 5: Performance
Show thumbnails instead of icons. It takes a lot of processor power to open
all the media files in a folder and generate thumbnail images, so this
option can potentially have a big effect on your PC??™s performance (at
least while you??™re using Windows Explorer). 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.
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