Windows 7 GUI slowness

What people said

kasabali · 2023-07 · Recommendation

Here's a more honest and direct introduction than Microsoft itself could wrote: [LINK] Especially follow the YouTube links demonstrating the problem: [VIDEO] [LINK]

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ndiddy · 2025-10 · Reference

I remember when 7 came out and people complained about how the UI was less responsive than XP! Example: [VIDEO] I guess Windows UI responsiveness has just been steadily declining since the early 2000s.

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StillBored · 2020-07 · Reference

While you might be slightly right, my experience tuning windows machines leads me to believe your missing the mark. I'm going to say the three largest contributions to general desktop lag are: Animations and intentional delays. It can't be said, how much faster a machine feels when something like MenuShowDelay is decreased to 0, or the piles of animations are sped up. Too many layers between the application draw commands and the actual display. All this compositing, vsync, and minimal 2d acceleration creates a low level persistent lag. Disabling aero on a win7 machine does wonders to its responsiveness. But even then pre-vista much of the win32 GDI/drawing API was basically implemented in hardware on the GPU. If you get an old 2d win32 API benchmark, you will notice that modern machines don't tend to fare well in raw API call performance. 30 seconds poking around on youtube, should find you a bunch of comparisons like this [VIDEO] . Keep in mind that even in 2020 pretty much every application on the machine is still relying on GDI (same as linux apps relying on xlib). Input+processing lag, USB is polling with a fairly slow poll interval rate (think a hundred or so ms). Combined with the fact that the keystrokes/events then end up queued/scheduled through multiple subsystems before eventually finding their way to the correct window, and then having to again reschedule and get the application to retrieve and process it via GetMessage()/etc. Basically, this is more a function of

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