How would I go about getting the solitaire artifacting effect on a window?

Question

I'm trying to find out how to get the effect that solitaire has when you finish a game but for normal windows.

I can't find out how to get artifacting ( similar to that safely ) online.

Answer 1

The artifacts that you might've seen on Windows 95–XP were the result of the window manager being non-compositing; programs would draw their window contents directly into the shared screen buffer. Whenever a window was covered, its old contents were discarded (over-painted by some other window), and whenever it was revealed, the program had to wake up and re-draw itself. If it did not respond in time, its window would still have pieces of the old window that used to be on top.

Windows Vista introduced the DWM and started using composition for all windows without exception; the "solitaire" artifacts no longer show up because the compositor stores separate buffers for each window's contents, so when a window is uncovered it's immediately re-drawn by the compositor from stored data, without relying on the program itself to do so.

Compositing in DWM cannot be disabled starting with Windows 8, although people seem to find ways to achieve it by killing the DWM process. Without window composition, a hung app (e.g. deliberately suspended via ProcExp or by attaching a debugger to it) would likely show similar artifacts when other windows are moved over it.