Print

Print


I upgraded to Windows Vista a couple months ago because I needed to
experience it in order to write about it and understand what customers are
going through.

My Thinkpad Z61t has been sluggish compared to running XP, something
documented in the trade press.  This morning I was looking at Task Manager
to see what proceses were eating up CPU.  A module called dwm.exe was
consistently taking up 12% or so of CPU.

Turns out this is the Desktop Window Manager, which handles the transparency
effects and other new features such as seeing a preview of a window by
mousing over its place on the Taskbar.

I disabled the transparency effect and dwm.exe fell to using about 5-6% of
CPU.

As it happens, I can't stand the transparency effect.  It makes it harder to
discern the top edge of the current window and it costs a lot of CPU.
Others using or deploying Vista may want to try turning it off.

/rich