If you’re suffering from poor performance on a Windows 7 laptop, a likely culprit is the extra visual effects. These visual effects were designed to be used on computers with dedicated 3D graphics cards, but some old corporate workstation laptops have Quadro 2D cards, and many modern laptops use poor quality integrated graphics. Microsoft forgot to implement the feature that turns the fancy effects off on these sorts of machines.
So… it’s quite easy to turn these off and you’ll get quite a boost.
Step 1
Press the Windows key on your keyboard, type “Appearance and Performance” into the Windows 7 Start Menu, and press Enter. You should arrive at a screen that looks like this:
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Step 2
Click ‘Adjust for Best Performance’. This will uncheck all the boxes. You can click ‘apply’ to try this out, but this setting tends to provide extremely poor usability for no real benefit, so…
Step 3
Re-check the boxes shown in this picture. (Don’t click apply/OK yet)
(Screenshot not archived.)
Step 4
For most post-2004 laptops. Once you’ve turned off all the superfluous animations and shadows, the Aero interface is typically about as fast as the old XP style interface. So we’ll also check…
- Enable Desktop Composition (3D ‘Aero’ mode)
- Enable transparent glass (note: you may not be able to see this. If you can’t - don’t worry about it)
Step 5
Click Apply, then OK.
FAQ
I want the old settings back…
If at any point you decide you like how your computer was before, simply select the “Adjust for best appearance” radio box (above the check-box list). This is the default setting in Windows 7.
Somehow everything got worse again…
If you selected a theme in the ‘Personalization’ section of the Windows Desktop Background settings, it will have reset all these settings - you need to go back and reconfigure them.
Is there something like this in XP?
Yes. Right click ‘My Computer’, click Properties, click the ‘Advanced’ tab and click ‘Performance’.
You’ll find a similar set of options with similar performance characteristics. Turning off Fisher-Price mode in XP provides a great performance boost.
I want to go further…
If you have a very large external monitor on your laptop then it may be worth going further. Otherwise you probably need to look elsewhere for performance tweaks.
That said, if you’re absolutely convinced there’s a graphics issue…
- Remove any Windows 7 ‘Gadgets’.
- Right Click the Desktop, Click ‘Personalize’, click ‘Desktop Background’, and pick something from the ‘Solid Color’ picture location.
- Press the Start key, type “Windows Update”, press enter. If any optional graphics updates are available, install them.
- Ensure that you don’t have a large number of files or large folders on your Desktop.
- Don’t run in dual-screen mode, use just the large monitor (Windows Key + P).
After doing this, go through these options one-by-one and try disabling them.
- “Enable transparent glass” (This will put you in a scaled-back XP-style interface)
- Use visual styles on Windows and buttons (This takes you back to Windows 2000 mode)
You can try disabling the other options but the chances are at this point that something else is causing the issue.