Windows 10/11 - Fix annoying animations' lag/stutter and framerate drops

Windows 8.1 was for sure a reception fiasco due to its too drastically renewed/changed UI/UX, but it also undoubtedly was a really smooth experience on any device (with a lot of connected animations locked @ 60fps) from the most lower-end and lower-consuption portable devices (like Surface RT) up to powerhouse desktop PCs.

Fast forwarding 9 years from there up until today with much more powerful devices and desktop PCs, both latest versions of Windows 10 and 11 are still not there yet.

Very often current Windows animations are still a stuttering/lagging mess even on most powerful devices and even with latest GPU drivers installed, on any system (including the most powerful PC). This is mostly due to suboptimization of the newer OS with divisive default settings which are coming with it.

During the years I tried a lot of things to bring the W8.1 snappiness back and I actually found a couple of solutions which will make your Windows 10/11 getting very close to it, let's see it below:

• First of all, a full (and safe) cleaning of your device is always recommended as a first step to ensure there are now junk software bogging down performance
• Secondly I also suggest to disable all the "logging" and privacy-related tasks for Windows to also lighten up running services in the background
• Be sure to have latest Windows + Drivers update for your system, including BIOS (usually you just need to run Windows Update + Go to Optional Updates section and also install what is proposed there)
• 
• Now let's start to change some settings from their defaults. Go to Windows Power Options and switch from the "Balanced" Power Plan to the "Best Performance" one:
• 
• This will use a bit more battery when unplugged, but will have less forced downclock on the GPU and will improve animations and FPS both in Windows & Games;
• Now it's time to talk about Intelligent Standby List Cleaner (& Maximum Timer Resolution): this free and portable tool will noticeably help in both clearing the "standby ram" when below a specific threshold to swiftly making it available again for actual applications (therefore improving performance) but most importantly guarantee that the Current Time Resolution is always equal to the Maximum Time Resolution for the PC and the display in use. This will dramatically improve both input lag/response, Windows animations' smoothness and average FPS in games (by also fixing most stutters) at the only cost of a bit more battery life consumption
• 
• Download the portable app from here 
• Extract the folder from the zip file where you want and open the app within it
• Configure the app as shown in the image above with the only exception to set the "Free memory is lower than:" value to half the actual RAM you have on the system (e.g. 32GB RAM = 16000; 16GB RAM = 8196MB as above; 8GB RAM = 4096 etc. It doesn't matter if it's not exactly half)
• Click on the "Start" button and make sure that 0,5ms is the actual number you see for "Current timer resolution"
• Reboot your PC and you should see the ISLC app automatically run on startup in idle on Taskbar icons

Even after all of this, you may still not have locked animations and smooth framerate 100% of the time (for which hopefully both Windows and Drivers will be improved in the future), but you should notice a very big improvement compared to default Windows settings.

EDIT:
If you find Windows animations even more slow after ISLC start: just disable it and don't use it anymore. It may not fit well with you hardware configuration. You can also delete its folder without issue as it's a portable application, no uninstall needed. All the other suggestions remain safe.

Enjoy ;)

-P