Simple ways to increase your computer’s performance - Disable Visual Effects in the Performance Options tab

Posted on July 17, 2007 at 5:35 pm

Make sure to read other posts from the Increase Computer Performance series!

Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace - Configuring the paging file
Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace - Defragmenting your hard drive
Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace - Stopping the startup programs!
Simple ways to increase your computer’s performance - Save hard disk space!
Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace - Turn off indexing on your local drives
Simple ways to increase your computer’s performance - Disable Visual Effects in the Performance Options tab

Ok, here’s another part in the increase your computer’s speed and performance series: disabling visual effects and setting Processor Scheduling and Memory Usage settings. These are fairly straight-forward and one of the simpler settings to change, I had just forgotten about it since I was trying to think of the MOST useful tips first. What that means is that this tip will increase computer performance minimally on most computers. It’ll be great for people who have old graphics cards in their systems or if something is misconfigured and you just didn’t know!

First off, disabling visual effects in Windows XP is going to make your desktop look like Windows 2000 again. If you hated that look, then don’t even worry about changing the settings. All the fancy buttons, sliding menus, shadows, glossy icons, etc will disappear when you disable visual effects. Ok, so if you really just want to speed things up a bit, here’s how to go about it:

Right-click on My Computer and click on Properties. This will bring you to the System Properties dialog. Go ahead and click on the Advanced tab as shown below:

Next, click on the Settings button underneath the Performance heading. This will get you to the Performance Options dialog:

The default setting in Windows XP is Let Windows choose what’s best for my computer, and if your computer is too slow, Windows should automatically choose Adjust for best performance, but unless you are running an ENIAC, there is no way in hell Windows is going to choose that option! Anyway, as you can see from the list, you can also manually uncheck items one by one, which allows you to get some of the nice things from XP’s new interface, but not everything.

Frankly, if you only like those nice buttons and glossy windows, but don’t really care for fading menus or sliding combo boxes, then go ahead and uncheck everything except the very last option: Use visual styles on windows and buttons. So you’ll still have the XP look, but get rid of the graphics card intensive add-ons. This will probably be good for anyone who has an integrated video card rather than a dedicated one.

So that’s it for the Visual Effects, not much else you can configure there. If you click on the Advanced tab, you’ll see a few more options that you just need to make sure are set correctly.

All that you need to make sure here is that both the Processor scheduling and Memory usage radio buttons are set to Programs. Unless you are running your computer as a web server or some other kind of service hosting type of server, then you should always have Programs selected. This will ensure that programs will get higher priority for the processor and the RAM than Windows services.

Please read the other articles in the series for more tips! Any comments are appreciated!