When an application running in Windows XP appears to bog down, you can often trace the problem to an overload of visual effects. Fortunately, the Visual Effects tab offers several ways to adjust Windows XP's use of these effects.
On most of the Windows XP systems that I've worked with, the default setting for visual effects is Let Windows Choose What's Best For My Computer. Under this setting, Windows XP analyses your video subsystem and determines which of the numerous visual effects your system is capable of handling. In most cases, the operating system enables almost all of the visual effects. However, what's good for the operating system may not be good for the applications.
Selecting the Adjust For Best Performance option clears all of the check boxes in the list box, thus disabling all of the visual effects. While this may seem like a drastic approach, sometimes it's just what you need to improve performance. Should you prefer something a little less drastic, you can select the Custom option. You can then choose from the various visual effects until you find a compatible mixture that provides a speedy yet visually appealing environment. As you scroll through the list of the various visual effects, you'll find that each one is aptly titled to let you know exactly what the setting enables or disables. The effects are:
- Animate windows when minimising and maximising.
- Fade or slide menus into view.
- Fade or slide ToolTips into view.
- Fade out menus after clicking.
- Show shadows under menus.
- Show shadows under mouse pointer.
- Show translucent selection rectangle.
- Show window contents while dragging.
- Slide open combo boxes.
- Slide taskbar buttons.
- Smooth edges of screen fonts.
- Smooth-scroll list boxes.
- Use a background images for each folder type.
- Use common tasks in folders.
- Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop.
- Use visual styles on windows and buttons.
Another access point
You can also access an abridged version of the visual effects settings from the Appearance tab of the Display Properties dialog box. When you click the Effects button you'll see the Effects dialog box, as shown in Figure C.
As you can see, the Effects dialog box combines some of the most common visual effects and provides access to a few others. For example, you can enable and disable the use of large icons on the desktop and on the Start menu.
Processor scheduling
The two options in the Processor scheduling panel allow you to control how Windows XP allocates processing power. As you saw in Figure B, the default setting in the Processor Scheduling panel is Programs, which basically configures Windows XP to focus the bulk of the processing power on the task, or program, that is running in the foreground. The Programs setting configures Windows XP to distribute processing power time slices among all running applications in short, variable-length bursts, and the program or task that is running in the foreground gets bigger time slices than those programs or tasks running in the background.
