If personal experience is anything to go by, I would imagine that most people find animations on their computer interesting for about five minutes. Then quite quickly your feelings turn to hatred.

The Microsoft paperclip was the object of many people’s anger and was usually binned as superfluous within the shortest time. There’s nothing more annoying, and patronising, when you’re stressed out and the computer is misbehaving, than having a bendy piece of metal being a smart ****. It only proved to a number of people that the programmers behind the operating systems were what they feared, adolescents who missed the nursery.

For some reason, this writer has not yet executed the dog which, for some reason, runs around yapping and barking while a file is being sought out, but it’s only a matter of time.

But there is a serious point here. Few computers, even high end machines, need to be burdened with superfluous nonsense. You don’t take a finely tuned athlete then fill his pockets with iron bars. You keep him as light as possible. So you don’t want your computer having to waste valuable memory and processing power having to draw pointless animations whilst they’ve got all their other jobs to do.

So, in Windows XP, click Start, Control Panel, Performance and Maintenance, System and then click the Advanced Tab. In the uppermost Performance box, click Settings and then you have a whole raft of Performance Options. The default setting is Let Windows Choose What’s Best For My Computer.

Right, just realised that that didn’t kill the dog. When I went in My Documents and clicked Search, that annoying little puppy was still there. So, right click on his body and it gives you three options. Choose another annoying character (no); get rid of him (yes); and, get the existing character to do a trick (why?).

If you miss your puppy, in My Documents, click Search and select, at the bottom of the Command box, Change Preferences, and you can get him back (but why would you want to?).

Annoying Animations & How to Disable Them – Recap

• animations are regarded by many as an annoying nuisance;
• they take come valuable computer power, so scrap them