October 26, 2008

Disable smooth scrolling in Vista (and Server 2008)

We're looking into upgrading to Windows Server 2008 at work, and I was looking into using Server 2008 as a desktop OS on my PC. I downloaded and installed a trial version of Server 2008, and immediately ran into the old smooth scrolling problem that I had with Vista.

But wait! The Neowin post has actually had an update after my previous post. And the suggested solution for disabling smooth scrolling actually worked! The correct solution is to use Tweak UI and disable the "Enable smooth scrolling" option in the Explorer section.

I never came across this solution because I've always used the old Windows 2000 Tweak UI even with Windows XP, so I never knew this option existed. Plus eventhough the new Tweak UI has this particular option, it's not needed in XP. In XP, the smooth scrolling option IE controls smooth scrolling in both Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer. But in Vista, the smooth scrolling in IE only controls IE itself, and apparently Vista has no way to disable smooth scrolling in Windows Explorer without using Tweak UI.

Other solutions that I've came across while searching for a solution to this problem mostly suggested going to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop] and set SmoothScroll=0. But obviously the solution wasn't that simple, or I would've done it much earlier. Changing the smooth scrolling option in Tweak UI changes more than just this one particular registry setting.

Vista here I come!

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