Windows 11 is packed with beautiful visual flair, including smooth window animations, transparent glass effects (Mica), sliding menus, and soft drop shadows. While these make the operating system look modern, they consume a significant amount of RAM and graphical processing power. If you are running Windows 11 on an older laptop or a budget PC and the system feels sluggish, turning off these unnecessary eye-candy effects can massively improve your performance.
How to Turn Off Animations
We can strip the operating system down to its bare essentials using the legacy Performance Options menu.
- Press the Windows Key on your keyboard, type
Advanced system settingsinto the search bar, and press Enter. - A small “System Properties” window will appear. Ensure you are on the Advanced tab.
- Under the “Performance” section at the top, click the Settings… button.
- A new “Performance Options” window will open.
- Look at the top of the window and select the radio button labelled Adjust for best performance.
You will immediately notice that every single checkbox in the long list below has been unticked. This disables all fading animations, shadows, and smooth scrolling.
A Quick Compromise
If “best performance” makes Windows 11 look too ugly, scroll down the list and manually re-check the box for Smooth edges of screen fonts. This ensures your text remains readable while still keeping all the heavy 3D animations disabled. Click Apply and then OK to save your changes.