In Windows 7 (and assumedly Vista), if you search for anim, the beginning of the word animation, the option to "Turn off unnecessary animations" pops up:
Click this brings up the Ease of Access Center portion of the Control Panel. If you scroll down, there’s the check box "Turn off all unnecessary animations (when possible)":
I checked this box just to see if I could get things done any faster in Windows 7.
The result? Things can get done a whole lot faster.
In the default way Windows 7 works, almost all menus fade in and out, minimize/maximize has an animation as well as several other parts of the OS. These animations I’m guessing are around 250 milliseconds each.
I was genuinely surprised at how much faster general operation was simply because I wasn’t waiting for menus to animate in or out of view. Sure, it’s not as "cool" as having them on, but I found myself breezing through menus a lot faster than usual.
The nice part about cutting off the animations is that it can be used with any theme, Aero-enabled or not.
If you find that the fading menus and other animations get in the way when doing your daily computing, try turning them off. It doesn’t require a theme change and is instant the moment you apply it.
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Is this noticeable for both older and newer computers? I have an overclocked 2600k and don’t notice any sort of lag.
Yes it is noticeable on any computer. Menu animations have nothing to do with performance because they make you wait for the sake of looking good. Turning them off won’t make your computer run any faster, but you will wait a lot less time for menus to render on screen.
I turn all that eye candy off on any of my systems, Linux as well.