How to turn off eye candy in Mountain Lion

[Peter May]

Hi!

I would like to make my iMac perform a bit better so I decided to turn off some of the effects.
I succesfully managed to disable the genie effect when minimizing a window with the yellow button.
My problem now is the green button and the effect it produces when the window gets bigger or smaller.
It gets really glitchy some times and it's quite annoying.
I couldn't find how to disable that.
Any help?

Also are there any other things I can disable to maximize performance?

Thank you in advance

 

[Xe89]

I have disabled window animations:

http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/25/disable-the-new-window-animation-in-mac-os-x-lion/

and also the Launchpad fading effect:

http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/10/disable-launchpad-fade-transition-effect-in-mac-os-x/

(Edited link)

 

[benwiggy]

I succesfully managed to disable the genie effect when minimizing a window with the yellow button.
My problem now is the green button and the effect it produces when the window gets bigger or smaller.
It gets really glitchy some times and it's quite annoying.
Also are there any other things I can disable to maximize performance?

What hardware are you running?

Normally, I would not expect the window resizing to be "glitchy" or slow on any machine that can run 10.8.
Unless you've got some very old hardware that can't handle the graphics, then I suspect you may have some other problem.

 

[Peter May]

I have disabled window animations:

http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/10/disable-launchpad-fade-transition-effect-in-mac-os-x/

and also the Launchpad fading effect:

http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/10/disable-launchpad-fade-transition-effect-in-mac-os-x/

Hello Xe89 and thank you for your reply,

Both links you posted redirect to the Launchpad fading effect.
I do not use launchpad at all so I don't think it will help me.

I am mostly interested in disabling the window animations if you could re post the correct link.

What hardware are you running?

Normally, I would not expect the window resizing to be "glitchy" or slow.
Unless you've got some very old hardware that can't handle the graphics, then I suspect you may have some other problem.

I am running an iMac 21.5'' (late 2009).
Hmm you think I might have a hardware problem?

 

[benwiggy]

Hmm you think I might have a hardware problem?

A 2009 Mac should be able to handle the normal graphics effects of Finder and OS X with no problem. An older Mac might struggle, but the "cut-off" for installing 10.8 has eliminated a lot of the hardware that wouldn't cope well.

I don't think it's necessarily a hardware problem: I would first launch Activity Monitor and see whether your CPU is being heavily used or if all your RAM is being used.
Also, check how much free disk space you have left. You want at least 10% free.

It might be worth booting to the Recovery Partition, running Disk Utility and Repairing the DISK on your main volume. (NB: DISK, not Permissions, which does nothing.)

 

[Peter May]

A 2009 Mac should be able to handle the normal graphics effects of Finder and OS X with no problem. An older Mac might struggle, but the "cut-off" for installing 10.8 has eliminated a lot of the hardware that wouldn't cope well.

I don't think it's necessarily a hardware problem: I would first launch Activity Monitor and see whether your CPU is being heavily used or if all your RAM is being used.
Also, check how much free disk space you have left. You want at least 10% free.

It might be worth booting to the Recovery Partition, running Disk Utility and Repairing the DISK on your main volume. (NB: DISK, not Permissions, which does nothing.)

Thank you for your reply benwiggy!

I have attached screen shots from my Activity Monitor both from the CPU tab and the RAM tab.

Disk space can't be an issue. My disk has 33GB/500GB used space.
I tend to keep all my files in external disks.

What do you mean by "boot to the Recovery Partition"?
I didn't boot from anywhere. I just went straight to Disk Utility and did "Verify Disk" and then "Repair Disk" and showed that it had no problems at all.
Are you referring to something else?

Thank you in advance

 

[Xe89]

Hello Xe89 and thank you for your reply,

Both links you posted redirect to the Launchpad fading effect.
I do not use launchpad at all so I don't think it will help me.

I am mostly interested in disabling the window animations if you could re post the correct link.

Sorry, I copied the wrong one. Here is the one about window animations:

http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/25/disable-the-new-window-animation-in-mac-os-x-lion/

Note that this is about the animation that occurs when opening new windows, the "zoom effect". I don't know how to disable the resizing animation. Perhaps you could try a third party tool like Divvy, it's both faster and more powerful than using the green circle (since I started using Macs I have actually never used the traffic lights at all).

 

[benwiggy]

What do you mean by "boot to the Recovery Partition"?
I didn't boot from anywhere. I just went straight to Disk Utility and did "Verify Disk" and then "Repair Disk" and showed that it had no problems at all.
Are you referring to something else?

Your CPU usage seems quite light: does the slow animation happen all the time, or just when you're busy with lots of apps? (You've got a lot of Chrome stuff going on there. I don't know if that's an issue.)
Your memory is being fully used and you are using a bit of swap (caching to disk). But not enough to cause this problem all the time.
If you click on the column headers, you can sort the table by those columns. So sorting by CPU% or Real Memory will be useful in seeing what is using the most.

As for Recovery Partition. Your hard drive has a hidden partition, called the Recovery Partition, which includes utilities and a reinstaller. You can't Repair the disk that you are currently running the system from (your main internal volume). "Repair Disk" is greyed out in Disk Utility when your Macintosh HD volume is selected. So you must have done something else.
By rebooting to the RP, you can then repair the disk.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

 

[gumblecosby]

Definitely disable the 3d dock. Your gui will be smoother for it.
Paste the following command into the Terminal application and press enter.
The terminal application is located in your "Utilities" folder:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock


This switches' your dock to the 2d version which helps to smooth things on less powerful computers.

 

[benwiggy]

Another Terminal command is this:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.001

which speeds up the time taken to resize windows.