Page 293 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

But you can make the taskbar look like it did in Vista or even Windows XP,

if you like. See “Bringing Back the Old Taskbar,” a free PDF appendix to
this book. It’s on the Missing CD page at missingmanuals.com.

Turning Off All Those Glitzy Animations

Then there are all those other things Windows does to show off: Windows

seem to zoom open or closed; the Close, Minimize, and Maximize buttons
glow when you point to them; menu commands and tooltips fade open and

closed; and so on.

It turns out there’s a master list of these effects, filled with individual on/off
switches for Windows’ various animations, pop-up previews, mouse and
window shadows, and so on.

To see it, press +S and start typing appearance until “Adjust the
appearance and performance of Windows” appears in the search results.
Click it.

You arrive in the Performance Options dialog box, on a tab called Visual
Effects. Now, these aren’t exactly the kinds of visual effects they make for
use in Star Wars movies. In fact, they’re so subtle, they’re practically

invisible. But the more of them you turn off, the faster the computer will
seem to work. (You can turn all of them off with one click—select “Adjust
for best performance.”) Here are a few examples:

Enable Peek. Yes, you can turn off the Peek feature, which lets
you (a) point to a taskbar thumbnail to see its full-size window pop

to the fore and (b) point to the Show Desktop button (right end of
the taskbar) to make all windows transparent.

Show shadows under windows/mouse pointer. Take a look:
Open windows may actually seem to cast faint, light-gray drop
shadows, as though floating an eighth of an inch above the surface

behind them. It’s a cool, but utterly superfluous, special effect.

Smooth edges of screen fonts. If you look very closely at the

characters on your screen, they look a bit ragged on the curves. But