Starting with Windows 7, Desktop Window Manager became a more integral part of Windows, that’s vital to creating the graphical user interface. Back in the Vista days, Desktop Window Manager was controlled through a service that you could turn off-and in turn disable all the visual effects. RELATED: How to Use the New Task Manager in Windows 8 or 10 Can I Turn Desktop Window Manager Off?

Because Windows is compositing and displaying the contents of each window, it can add effects like transparency and window animations when layering the windows for display. Windows then creates one “composite” view of all the windows on the screen before sending it to your monitor.

Instead of applications drawing their displays directly to your screen, applications write the picture of their window to a specific place in memory. This article is part of our ongoing series explaining various processes found in Task Manager, like ctfmon.exe, mDNSResponder.exe, conhost.exe, rundll32.exe, Adobe_Updater.exe, and many others. Don’t know what those services are? Better start reading! So What Is Desktop Window Manager?ĭesktop Window Manager (dwm.exe) is a compositing window manager that renders all those pretty effects in Windows: transparent windows, live taskbar thumbnails, Flip3D, and even high resolution monitor support.

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