In Windows XP you will find Visual Effects which make its appearance nice. While these effects give an attractive working environment, they also consume your computer resources since they are merely graphical effects.

The Visual Effects settings in Windows Performance options let you liberate the resources being used by windows free and provide better windows performance when you disable these visual effects. To find visual effects settings:

1. Right click My Computer icon
2. Click Properties
3. Go to Advanced tab and click Settings button under Performance.
4. In Visual Effects tab choose "Adjust for best performance".

Note: There is just one thing that I don't like about choosing the "Adjust for best performance" option and it's that your desktop icons start appearing strange when you apply this setting. To fix this problem scroll down in the options under "Custom" and mark the second last option checked, i.e. "Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop". Now your icons will look normal. Click Apply and OK.