England completed their sixth successive Test victory - and opened up a 2-0 series lead over Pakistan - with nine wickets to spare on the fourth afternoon at Edgbaston.
Only the early departure of Alastair Cook cast any temporary lingering doubt over the outcome, and perhaps a longer-lasting shadow over another dominant performance.
Cook's dismissal left the hosts 7-1, in pursuit of 118. But captain Andrew Strauss and Jonathan Trott responded with unbeaten 53s in a century stand which eased England through the remainder of a sunny morning and then beyond their modest target.
Pakistan's second innings finished on 296 all out in only the second over on Tuesday when No.11 Mohammad Asif was last out - pushing a simple catch to gully off Stuart Broad.
England's pursuit then began unconvincingly on a surface where low bounce - and turn for off-spinner Saeed Ajmal - had become the main dangers.
Cook extended his run of poor form, stuck on the crease to Mohammad Aamer and bowled by one he would surely have intercepted somehow if he had got forward.
Apart from the early jolt to England's confidence, and boost for Pakistan's, Cook's seventh successive Test score under 30 - since his hundred in Bangladesh five months ago - added to the ongoing concern about his poor productivity.
There would have been plenty more for England to worry about had Zulqarnain Haider, Pakistan's batting hero on Monday, clung on to an outside edge behind the stumps when Strauss went after a short ball in Ajmal's first over.
That would have been 17-2 - with both openers gone. But Pakistan, whose catching has been faulty all match, could not afford any such slips in an equation which allowed them no room for error.
Haider committed another, in near action replay but from a more defensive Strauss bat off Ajmal, when the England captain was 12 short of his 108-ball 50.
Strauss needed another slice of luck five runs later, Asif failing to get more than a fingertip on a swirling catch running back at deep mid-off from the part-time off-spin of Shoaib Malik.
Trott's chanceless half-century came up with a resounding cover-drive off Malik for his sixth four from the 100th ball he faced. Despite the fightback engineered by Haider's battling 88, which at least forced England to make fourth-innings runs, the tourists had made many of their own problems.
They certainly had only themselves to blame for collapsing to 72 all out after winning the toss on day one, an already untenable position from which no one has recovered sufficiently to win a Test match since the 19th century.