What is dwm.exe And Why Is It Running?
You are no doubt reading this article because you are wondering why this dwm.exe process is taking more memory than you think it should, and you are curious what it does. Thankfully for you, we have the answer.
So What Is It Anyway?
Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe) is the compositing window manager that gives you all those pretty effects in Windows Vista: Transparent windows, live taskbar thumbnails (that you can resize now), and even the Flip3D switcher that you can disable and replace with Switcher.
What happens in Vista is that applications write the picture of their window to a specific place in memory, and then Windows creates one “composite” view of all the windows on the screen before sending it to your monitor. Because Vista is keeping track of the contents of each window, it can add effects when layering the windows such as the transparency we’re all used to, as well as the live preview thumbnails.
The benefit to using this approach is that Windows Vista can utilize the hardware acceleration features in your video card to create very smooth animations for minimizing and restoring, and even for the transparent effects.
What about Memory Usage?
If you open up Task Manager, you can see the dwm.exe process in the list, typically taking somewhere between 30-50MB of memory in my testing:
The size of the DWM process is controlled by the number of windows that you have open, since each window requires a buffer in memory to store the contents of the window. If you have a large number of very large windows open, DWM will use more memory.
The benefits of using a compositing window manager are worth that relatively small amount of memory under most circumstances.
Does Switching to the Vista Basic Theme Turn it Off?
The short answer is no, just switching to the Vista Basic theme will not turn off DWM, but it will reduce the memory usage a great deal.
How do you switch to Vista Basic? Just right-click on the desktop, choose Personalize, and then Window Color and Appearance:
Click on classic appearance properties at the bottom:
Then choose Windows Vista Basic and click the Apply button:
Note that I’m not recommending switching to the Basic theme, just explaining how to do it.
So How Do I Turn dwm.exe Off Then?
Note that I don’t recommend turning this off unless you are playing games in fullscreen mode, and even then it likely won’t help increase speed.
The only way to get rid of the dwm.exe process is to stop the service from running. Open up Services from Control Panel or the start menu, and then find the “Desktop Window Manager Session Manager” service in the list, and click the stop button. Note that you will be switched to the Vista Basic theme when you click the button.
To permanently disable it, double click on the item and select Disabled from the “Startup type” drop-down:
If you want to use the command line instead, you can open an administrator mode command prompt and use one of these commands:
| Stop Service | net stop uxsms |
| Start Service | net start uxsms |
| Disable Service | sc config uxsms start= disabled |
| Enable Service | sc config uxsms start= auto |
By now you should understand what the process does… do you really still want to get rid of it?
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Thank you! I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get this worthless process gone forever!
why to save 50 MB of ram when I have 4gb in pc
@tomas
This series of guides is more about explaining what the processes are than anything else. I didn’t advocate getting rid of the process, in fact I think I did the opposite.
Personally I love the new desktop window manager, I like how smoothly everything animates.
@The Geek, Do you recommend disabling this service if you only have Vista Home Basic?
Nice post !
I like the way you present things in an interesting way!
I’m impressed!
tomas,
You may have 4gb of mem in your pc, but unless you are running 64-bit Vista, not all of it is allocated or being used.
MY vista seems a little different from what you said in your instructions but I switched to basic and it just says under processes dwn.exe memory 1,484k….I have Vista business 2 gig memory chips,
What I would like to know is the paging file settings for using the cache as I am not certain of this…Ill ask on the forums I just noticed that.
thanks for your help
I love these guides to the processes that are running. Very helpful.
Who care? I have 8Gb RAM running on Vista x64 SP1..
Nice job of explaining dwm.exe to the average user.
Hmmm… I just did that (switched to classic theme) and it actually made dwm.exe run more of my memory…
It went from 21K to 34K memory. Sadness. The only difference btw the “theme” I was using was the background, but I was like, what the heck, let’s see what it does. Stupid Vista…
I find that by going to systems advanced and tick the box custom not let windows decide and then in settings un-tick all boxes and use windows standard or classic you get much more memory back
Oh just switch to XP, I’m pi***d off with Vista, it’s slow, it churns your hard drive, I cannot access the features as easily as XP, sure it looks pretty but most people sacrifice the aero, flip 3d, and sidebar and turn off indexing because they find out that there cpu is runing at 80-99% and there hard drive looks like it’s going to pack in at any moment trying to run them. The more RAM you put in your Vista machine, the more it uses. I have 2GB, used to have 1 and the machine still runs much slower than XP. I have dissabled the sidebar, left the pretty DWM on, dissabled superfetch (defrags your hard drive while you are using your computer – not healthy in my opinion) dissabled windows defender and firewall as I have kaspersky internet security that does all that and far better! Dissabled readyboost coz I don’t use it. I turned off useless windows search coz that churns away at the memory, cpu and hard drive and because I very rarely loose a file that I create. And now my computer runs more like XP but prettier, it’s now usable and boots up much better.
Thats my 2 pennies!
Thanx for this useful tip. Vista is a good OS but DWM itself is shitty useless feature. i dont need damn aero but faster OS. again thanx
What makes me wonder is why does dwm.exe regularly want access to the internet? I find that there are several of these types of things in Vista that want access to the internet when their function does not seem to imply any need other than patches or updates that should be taken care of in the regular way.
Totally agree with Paul Sumner’s post (3 posts above this one), my experiences with VISTA are identical to his, indexing, superfetch, system restore, turned off, a whole load of services Bill Gates deems neccessary, that I did not need were disabled, Defender disabled, VISTA Firewall disabled, Security Center disabled, (I use Eset Smart Security Center, does a much better job using less resources) Windows Update disabled, UAC disabled, Sidebar disabled, yet I still had around 30 services running in the background. With VISTA at idle and with no applications open it was sucking up 550MB of my 2GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 memory, thats over 25% of my memory gone just to keep VISTA ticking over.
Compare this to my XP-PRO SP3 set-up (I’m dual booting). 14 services running in the background, XP at idle takes just 96 MB of memory, and everything runs faster, applications open and run faster, gaming is faster, just about anything I want to do is faster on my XP partition.
If you want pretty looks use VISTA + Aero, if you want a fast system use XP !
Thank You, DWM was taking a lot of un-harnesses RAM of my 3GB and I wanted it to stop.
thank you! thank you! thank you! my headaches are gone
Thanks a ton dude…
Thanks a lot Mr. Geek ,
asa the name of ur url, ur site has adequate information about the vista and all , i;ve been using vista from more then a year , but i just jfound it today and your site has lots of tips and tricks.
very good , keep up ur tech expertise. welldone man.
What will DWM do if left running while using the Vista Basic theme? Is it worth it to leave it on or should just permanently disable it? What are the pros and cons? Thanks in advance.
What if your “Windows Aero” color scheme disappeared? How can I get that back? I can’t play any animation for my desktop background anymore. Also, I don’t think windows can access the DWM even though its set to automatic.
@don: See http://www.howtogeek.com/howto.....-it-again/
Hi,
this is very comprehensive info, as well as all the follow-up replies.
I have XP + Vista on my desktop, and Vista in my note. With Vista Aero Flip 3D, I’m possessed with this visual issue:
I start to flip, all goes fine, fast, smooth and little CPU usage, but when I press Enter to stop at the foremost window I OFTEN notice short visual overlaying with the image of the window from where I started to flip. It comes as temporarily (for a short while, like blinking) overlaying the foremost window with text strings or an image of a documnet or a web-site from the window from where I started flipping.
This does irritate and is hard for eyes. I have latest video driver properly installed, updated DirectX for this purpose – but all in vain, did not help at all.
Did anyone notice this ? Is it supposed to be this way ?
Thank you.
Thank you Paul Sumner…. I just purchased a new Dell XPS with Vista… My previous laptop was running XP… My Desktop is running Vista… Over the past 3 days I noticed my Dell’s hard drive crunching away… I disabled Windows Search, Ready Boost and Superfetch… As each one was disabled my hard drive made less noise.. Currently it’s silent.. I did not disable any of these items on my desktop… I have always felt that the most volitile part on our laptops are the hard drives… I feel that with continualy hard drive activity you’re just increasing your chance of a hard drive failure…
I wonder if disabling DWM can help alleviate the problem of random VPU recoveries. I got those occasionally in normal use (not in a game).
Strange …. my DWM in Vista is only using 484k memory.
I read all these comments and do not understand a lot of what is being discussed. However, I remember when I got my Vista computer over a year ago, I struggled through about a week of days trying to understand what I had and what I could do to make it as useful as possible to a non geek. I immediately disliked most of the gimmicks. One of the first things I did was choose everything “classic” that I could find, including colors and appearance. I set all my windows colors, borders, and buttons the way I like them, a pukey yellowish green that is really easy on the eyes. I think by making all these classic choices I must have accidentally also cut down some of the performance robbers, though Vista is certainly not the race car my old XP was. It’s appearance definitely resembles the old XP now though.
This website has sure been a gold mine for tweaking some more usefulness out of Vista. I have happily implemented several of the tips. If I have to ride a pig, it might as well be as good a pig as I can make it.
@ Wojo: I’d enable ReadyBoost, assuming you have a ReadyBoost capable USB drive connected. It will actually reduce hard disk churning, once the cache is built.
How do I turn off the above services? Every time I try, Task Manager is telling me “access is denied.” I never had that problem with XP. Also, some of the processes posters suggest turning off are easy to identify. Others, I just can’t recognize from the cryptic abbreviation in Task Manager. Help?!
thank you very much geek I like your site, and I have saved to my bookmarks.
You see, this is why I keep coming back to you guys and gals for answers. You are the answer man to my questions. If anyone has a problem with their geek stuff, and they ask me. Why? Because I sound geek smart. Why? Because I read yawl’s stuff. I smile and I refer your site.
Thanks loads for being here.
My friend Isaac had his desktop window manager around 100k once, and I told him to end the process, and he did. HE LAGGED TERRIBLY ON Guild Wars… But then he called me up one day and told me he could reduce the memory. He wouldnt tell me how. But, thanks to this website, I found out how. THANKS HOW TO GEEK!!!!!
@Paul:
Your CPU is at 80-99%? Mine is at 50%, and that’s because Google Chrome is using 47%. And I have all the visual things left at default.
Wow! What a difference. Thank you.
Since you knew how to increase the speed by adjusting the use of Vista can you tell me what the heck the code 80070490 is when attempting to update Vista – I have not been able to update since a month after I got Vista -
You said to disable it, go to Services from control panel. Control panel does not have a ’services’
Great explanations! Thanks
Thanks for the help?
I meant!
JAMIE wrote, “Since you knew how to increase the speed by adjusting the use of Vista can you tell me what the heck the code 80070490 is when attempting to update Vista”
I found an MS article about this that says it can be caused by a damaged .NET component, and gives a link to a clean-up utility to fix it. Here’s the article:
http://www.microsoft.com/commu.....12&p=1
Thanks, Geek – Great job on the site. You’re in my permanent bookmarks list..
Mark Magill
thank you – have freed up vital memory
Rohit wrote this and I fully agree.
Nice post !
I like the way you present things in an interesting way!
I’m impressed!
To you poore peoble with Wista problems.Look forward to Win 7.
I think you will find it much better.
Rigth now it runs with 3 browers with lots of windows open,thunderbird email klient,Photoshop, taskmanager and controlpanel at 12,5mb
Thats seems to be alright.
I think I have a virus on my new computer. I am running Windows Vista 64bit and randomly there will be the sound of commercials playing on my computer. When I open the task manager, I see that the Internet Explorer is opened 58 times! Usually I close all of the IE’s but then they pop up again later. What should I do?
That was the best explination on anything. Very nice in explaining the benifits and those ways around adjusting for it. I agree with most of the people who would turn it down or off for the sake of speed. I can see why some people would the visuals are nice, but as you had said, if you are running a large full screen game, why not turn off the visual service? I guess in a sense explorer is running but I often turn that off too
then check your start-up services and see if any of those are it. You can also get a program to monitor your on-line traffic and/or application traffic to eliminate it. Easiest thing to do though, is run Spybot or Ad-aware.
Anyways, nice work.
@Brian R
This really isn’t the place for posting a question, but you have adware/spyware on your computer. There are some that when you run IE it will launch another hidden IE for ads though some will also do this when you boot or periodically (sp?) The most common sense thing to do is to just download a spyware cleaner such as Spybot: Search and Destroy or Ad-Aware. Otherwise, you want to check what is set to boot on start-up (Run>MSConfig) make sure you know what is booting and while you are at it, turn off things that you don’t need booting
this is crazy, my dwm.exe went from 40,000k to 1,168k when i changed the theme to vista basic…cant believe it. Thanks!!
dwm.exe is ace, but does it work in microsoft 7?