If you have an older Mac and have updated it to more current software and feel that the machine is just not responding as quickly as it used to, this could be a useful trick for you.
The newer operating systems utilize a lot of animation features that are very slick with a machine powerful enough to show them well, but if you are on an older machine, they can cause sluggishness that is just unnecessary. If you want to disable them, here is a command for Terminal that will allow you to do just that.
Before playing with Terminal it is always a good idea to make sure that you are comfortable with it as entering something incorrectly could be catastrophic for your machine.
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false
What that does is disables all window animations in OS X, allowing the processor to focus on what you’re trying to do. To disable it is enter the following:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool true
This will bring back the functionality that was disabled by the previous command.