Change Skin speeds up your computer

I just learned that if I change my skin to Windows Classic (in Windows XP) and don't have a background image, my computer goes remarkably faster. Really nice , I actually noticed Adobe Photoshop starting up faster.

Yes, this change can help considerably. However, my user account and others who use this computer don't use Windows Classic theme, the XP Theme looks nicer and speed isn't a problem here.

Some other changes that you could make are:

Windows animations when maximizing/minimizing

Fading tooltips

Fading menus

Menu shadows

Mouse pointer shadow

Contents in window while moving or a moving frame

Sliding taskbar buttons

Smooth fonts on monitor

Smooth scrolling of list boxes

Background images for folders

"Common tasks" in folders (sidebar on the left)

Icon label shadows on Desktop

Visual styles (if disabled, it is automatically Classic theme)

*Disabling the settings in red may take some time to get used to, they are clearly visible (unlike other options, like shadows).

 

All of these can be changed and disabled via this method:

Go to System Properties

Click the Advanced tab

Under the Performance section, click Settings.

Choose 1 of the options (recommended, appearance, performance) or a custom setup.

There are a few more options that you can change there. You can also adjust memory usage and other stuff to speed up your computer, if you know what you are doing.

 

Have fun tweaking!

I tweaked a few of them, but I don't want major graphical differences so I left on ClearType and Common Tasks. I use the Common tasks.. sometimes. And Cleartype looks much better.By the way, after getting used to Windows Classic it looks pretty cool.

Edited June 15, 2007 by MediYama (see edit history)

I used windows classic for a long LOOOONG time and automatically that was always my first thing on a fresh computer was to change it. I still can't use the default xp theme for long, I have to switch to silver at least. I hate the bright colors of the default, it just looks too plasticy and toyish for me. Too distracting.As for the things listed above, you can get a significant performance boost with them. I know on my old computer windows xp was sluggish so I killed almost all the graphical doo-dads and it ran nice and smooth even on a very low end system. Worth testing each one, seeing if the visual loss is acceptable, and seeing if there is any noticeable performance boost.

I currently use the normal windows xp theme and it's fine for me. The speed is pretty good on this compute but i have a much slower one that is on xp, you really do notice the difference on slower computers.Custom themes on the other hand can perform very badly. Sometimes you find ones that are good looking and don't put too much strain on your computer, others just perform so badly that it can take ages just to right click.So overall.. Classic windows skin is the best for performance on slower machines, Default one isn't bad for today's machines and custom ones are a mixed bag.-HellFire

Yeah, usually I also turn off/disable or turn on/enable something on an OS to get some performance, due to I hate when my computer works very slow, some days ago I bought a new graphics card, but don't see a lot of speed, will need to do some more tests after my exams.. For sometime when using Windows, I used different skins for it by third party software, it didn't run slower or something, but for sometime now I am using the default windows xp blue skin, except I changed my pointer and bootskin just for fun, but to tell the truth I am bored from it and will think that will change it if I find some nice skin.. By the way, for tweaking xp, I always disable the windows sounds, as for me they are irritating!

ya i learned of this method of making your computer faster just recently and it has helped me fo stuf remarkabley faster i suggest this to anyone with a slow computer the goods out weigh the bad graphics lol anyways its pretty easy to get used to the classic style especially if u find something u like

For me, I even disabled the Theme service on my computer to speed up the boot time. Just click Start --> Run, then type services.msc (make sure you're already admin). Then scroll down to find themes. Right click the service, hit properties. In the drop down box (by default) that says "Automatic", change that to "Disabled". Hit ok.xboxrulz

Ya, it must have surely helped. Because modern skin consumes more RAM than the classic skin. Therefore with the classic skin on, you have got more free RAM which is ultimately going to increase your computer's speed as any other program like photoshop will have more memory to consume and easily unload.

I do the same on my laptop. It's a Pentium III 500 with only 128 MB of RAM.When I only switched to the Windows Classic Theme, I didn't notice much of an improvement to the overall computer performance. I had to disable most of the graphical enhancements, e.g. sliding bars and fading effects, to really notice a difference. I kept ClearType and Common tasks, too, because I really couldn't function well without them.I've been wondering, though... Does disabling the graphical enhancements help performance because it takes load off the processor or the memory? I have a desktop computer with basically the same configuration as my laptop, except that it has 256 MB of RAM, and it seems to run much smoother. I do realize that additional 128 MB of RAM can make a difference, but the desktop computer runs much smoother even when I'm not running anything on the laptop!I understand that those graphical enhancement must be using some processing resources, but their load on RAM must be significantly higher. Can anyone confirm this?

Had done it all along in my XP days, but since i upgraded to vista.... the eye candies are just too pretty lose! yea, changing it back to classic would make it much much faster, but if i do it then whats the point of getting vista? I rather splash some money to get a better rig which i did hehe.