Any way to have shadows under windows with GNOME _without_ compositing

[Amn]

Hi all,

I know Metacity has a flag which enables compositing, and draws shadows under windows. Thing is, I prefer shadows because it helps me distinguish stuff on the desktop - a sort of usability an readability feature for me. However, I don't know if my older Thinkpad is too slow to do compositing in X or Metacity code is not optimized enough (yet), but turning compositing on makes my desktop experience too sluggish for my tastes.

I know Windows XP did shadows without compositing big portions of the screen, and it worked fast enough even for the desktop computers of its day.

Anyone knows what are my options here? I like GNOME and/or GTK (haven't though much about the important details here) and would like to keep it. Do I need to switch to Openbox or Fluxbox or something like that? I am on Ubuntu 10.04, Thinkpad T43 with Pentium-M 2.0Ghz, 1GB RAM.

[elija]

What graphics card have you got and what drivers are installed?

I can't say I've noticed any problems with Gnomes compositing but if you are having real issues you could try XFCE which is a lighter environment that also uses GTK.