dwm.exe

[Nebersek]

Hi all
I am a vista user i have questions regarding dwm.exe . What it is ? Its cosuming more than 40 Mb(as shows in task manager) when i end this process nothing happens just it reapears again any i dea whats going on with my PC. is it a virous or something malware type program? Any suggestions will be helpful.

[TheGreatOne]

you are wondering why this dwm.exe process is taking more memory than you think it should, and you are curious what it does.

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.

[Nebersek]

Thank you very much TheGreatOne for providing me so much detail answer of my question. But don't you think 40-50 Mb usage of memory is more than a normal?

[MurTuza]

Thank you very much TheGreatOne for providing me so much detail answer of my question. But don't you think 40-50 Mb usage of memory is more than a normal?

If you open up Task Manager, you can see the dwm.exe process in the list, typically taking somewhere between 30-50MB of memory.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.

[Floyd]

If you open up Task Manager, you can see the dwm.exe process in the list, typically taking somewhere between 30-50MB of memory.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.

Yeah I was having same kind of doubt Oh now I got why its using more memory.So does Switching to the Vista Basic Theme Turn it Off? I mean if I will use basic theme then dwm.exe will not do anything right? So will it switch off?

[TheGreatOne]

Yeah I was having same kind of doubt Oh now I got why its using more memory.So does Switching to the Vista Basic Theme Turn it Off? I mean if I will use basic theme then dwm.exe will not do anything right? So will it switch 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. near about to 2-3 MB.