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By Dave Taylor
The Question:
Finally, finally, I upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7 and it’s pretty, but the interface is a lot slower. Is there some way to turn off some of the fancy zoom, shadow and transparency effects so Win7 speeds up?
Dave’s Answer:
You’ve been running Windows XP until just now? Late 2011? I’m impressed, I thought there weren’t any more holdouts and that maybe some people got stuck with Vista, but generally I recommend that everyone upgrade and be running Windows 7 by this point. Windows 8? I’ve run some of the developer preview editions and am not particularly impressed with the changes to date. Hopefully it’ll be more compelling by the time it’s released to the public.
Windows 7 introduces a slick but processor intensive graphical user interface environment called Aero and it’s quite possible that it is slowing down your computer, as you suspect. This is particularly possible if you have an older computer, slow graphics processor or insufficient RAM memory for your system.
What’s slick is that Windows 7 actually includes an analysis tool that lets it automatically figure out how fast your system is, then set up all the graphic “frosting” based on your actual system performance. Still, you can always tweak things to your liking. Let’s have a look…
To get to the performance tweaks, launch the “Performance Information and Tools” Control Panel:
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This post is excerpted with permission from Dave Taylor.
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