Initially, Windows XP may appear intuitive, but in long¬term use it's slow, and the many animations and effects in the interface are distracting. You can turn the brightly coloured design off with a few clicks in the Control Panel's Display module. Click on the Designs tab and select the entry Windows Classic from the dropdown list. The system will change its appearance without a restart. You will have to alter the Start Menu's appearance separately.

Right-click on the Start button and choose Properties from the context menu. The Start menu tab allows you to customise the appearance. If you have a lot of applications on your computer, after clicking the Customize button enable the Scroll Programs option so clicking on Start/Programs opens a scrollable list
of programs.

Expanding the Programs List takes time. You can change the delay in the Registry: find the key Hkey_Current_ User\ControIPanel\Desktop. Open the entry MenuShowDelay by double-clicking on it and enter a value of 200. In the Registry branch under Hkey _ Current_ User\ControlPanel \Desktop\ WindowMetrics you can also turn off the animations used when maximising, minimising or moving windows. To do this, create a string in the key called MinAnimate and allocate it a value of O.