Among the performance options offered is a “Visual Effects” tab which allows you to enable or disable many of the visual effects to help improve performance (particularly for older/slower systems).

There are some blanket settings you can make like “Adjust for best appearance” and “Adjust for best performance” which enable and disable all of the individual options respectively. The improvement is not likely to be significant, but the following individual options are available for your choosing:

* Animate controls and elements inside windows
* Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing
* Fade or slide menus into view
* Fade or slide ToolTips into view
* Fade out menu items after clicking
* Show preview and filters in folder
* Show shadows under menus
* Show shadows under mouse pointer
* Show thumbnails instead of icons
* Show translucent selection triangle
* Show windows contents while dragging
* Slide open combo boxes
* Slide taskbar buttons
* Smooth edges of screen fonts
* Smooth-scroll list boxes
* Use a background image for each folder type
* Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop
* Use visual styles on windows and buttons