Slow scrolling with IE8 and old PC

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At work, I installed Internet Explorer 8 on an old computer running XP to see how well it would work with our Learning Management System. It was immediately apparent that the scrolling and rendering performance of IE 8 was very poor. Each click on the scroll bar resulted in a jerky redraw of the page in 1″ rows. IE 8 uses new rendering techniques that cause scrolling to be painfully slow on the old Dell.

The group policy on all the machines prevents alteration of any Internet Explorer settings not on the temporary items tab, so I could not tinker with those. But display settings are accessible. Shutting off hardware acceleration did fix the problem, and now IE 8 is just as fast as earlier versions.

To turn off hardware acceleration:

  1. Select Start > Control Panel > Display
  2. Select the General tab
  3. Click the Advanced button.
  4. Select the Troubleshoot tab
  5. Drag the Hardware Acceleration slider to the left.
  6. Click OK