The Window Scaling Animation
Windows 10 is designed to feel fluid and responsive, heavily relying on the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) to render motion. One of the most obvious effects is controlled by the “Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing” setting. When this is active, clicking the minimize button doesn’t instantly hide the application; instead, the window rapidly shrinks and slides down into its respective icon on the taskbar. Conversely, maximizing a window causes it to quickly expand outward from its current position to fill the entire screen.
While this zooming animation helps users visually track where their applications are going, it introduces a forced, artificial delay into the workflow. If you are rapidly switching between multiple full-screen applications or minimizing several windows to reveal your desktop, you have to wait for this scaling animation to finish every single time. Furthermore, on extremely low-end hardware or inside virtual machines without hardware acceleration, this animation can stutter badly. Disabling this effect ensures that windows snap instantly to full screen or vanish instantly to the taskbar.
How to Turn Off Minimizing Animations
You can force windows to resize instantly via the advanced system performance settings.
- Click the Start button and type Advanced system settings.
- Select View advanced system settings from the search results. This directly opens the System Properties window to the Advanced tab.
- Under the Performance section near the top, click the Settings… button.
- A new “Performance Options” window will appear. Ensure you are on the Visual Effects tab.
- Scroll through the list of effects and locate the checkbox labelled Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing.
- Click the checkbox to remove the checkmark.
- Click Apply, and then click OK.
From now on, clicking the minimize or maximize buttons in the top right corner of any application will result in an instant, zero-delay change in window state.