On this example system, there are a half-dozen active apps running, including Chrome, which has got more than a dozen tabs open. What Can I Do If It’s Using Up RAM and CPU?ĭesktop Window Manager should use fairly minimal resources. The good news is that Desktop Window Manager has gotten a lot better about how it manages resources, and you shouldn’t really need to turn it off. That integration has deepened even further in Windows 8, 10, and 11.

Starting with Windows 7, Desktop Window Manager became a more integral part of Windows, that’s vital to creating the graphical user interface. Back in the Vista days, Desktop Window Manager was controlled through a service that you could turn off-and in turn disable all the visual effects. RELATED: How to Use the New Task Manager in Windows 8 or 10 Can I Turn Desktop Window Manager Off? Because Windows is compositing and displaying the contents of each window, it can add effects like transparency and window animations when layering the windows for display. Windows then creates one “composite” view of all the windows on the screen before sending it to your monitor. Instead of applications drawing their displays directly to your screen, applications write the picture of their window to a specific place in memory. Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe) is a compositing window manager that renders all those pretty effects in Windows: transparent windows, live taskbar thumbnails, Flip3D, and even high resolution monitor support.

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