Animations in Windows 8 give a certain feeling of fluidity whenever you open, minimize, maximize and close windows. These visual effects also come with the cost of a certain delay. If you have a powerful rig, disabling them won’t make much of a difference, but for older computers or less powerful hardware configurations you could see a notable performance improvement if you give them up.

1. Open the Control Panel in icons view and click/tap on the System icon. Select Advanced System Settings.

2. In the System Properties window – Advanced tab, click/tap on the Settings button in the Performance pane.

3. In the Performance Options window – Visual Effects tab there are several animation options which you can disable:

– Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing

– Animations in the taskbar

– Fade or slide menus into view

– Fade or slide ToolTips into view

– Fade out menu items after clicking

– Show shadows under windows

– Slide open combo boxes

You can also use the “Adjust for best performance” option and let the operating system tweak the visual effects, if you don’t want to manually go through all of those settings. There are two other options: “Let Windows choose what’s best for my computer” (default) and “Optimize for best appearance”.

You can choose any of them, however the purpose of this article is to improve Windows 8 performance (even if only by a little) so we recommend you choose “Adjust for best performance”.