Microsoft Windows 2000
Server Administrator's Companion

by Sharon Crawford & Charlie Russel
copyright (c) 2000 by Microsoft Corporation
all rights reserved


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Window Contents While Dragging

By default, Windows 2000 enables what is sometimes known as a full-window drag (a trendy feature first made popular by the NextStep operating system, just in case you were curious), which means that instead of simply seeing an outline of a window that you’re moving or resizing; you see the full window contents.

This requires some significant graphics processing.   Even if you have a high-power display card, dragging or resizing windows while the content is displayed usually takes close to 100% of your computer’s processing power. 

Windows 2000 manages this well, but if you have a slow display card or some very important tasks that you don’t want to slow down - even temporarily (such as video capture, or other real-time operations), you should disable this feature. To do so, follow these steps:

  1. Start Menu > Settings > Control Panel
  2. Select Display.
  3. Go to the Effects tab.
  4. Under Visual Effects you can check or uncheck Show window contents while dragging to disable or enable this feature.