Disabling useless processers & Windows features.
Windows XP has came with quite a few new but extremly useless and memory hogging features that constantly run in the background and slow your system down.
Some of the features that should be disabled are automatic updates, system restore and remote assistance.
To disable these 3 fairly useless services...
1. Hit Start
2. Select Control Panel
3. Select Performance and Maintenance
4. Select System
5. Select System Restore Tab
6. Check "Turn off System Restore"
7. Select Automatic Updates tab
8. Select "Turn off autoamtic updates"
9. Hit the Remote tab
10. Uncheck "Remote Assistance" & "Remote Desktop
Now that the three main WIndows features that severly hog your PC's power are disabled, its time to move onto the numerous other Windows processers that further drag down your system.
1. Hit start
2. Select Control Panel
3. Select Adminastrative Tools
4. Select Services
Now there should be a large list of services and alot of them are running on your system right now.
Alot are vital for running Windows and alot are completely useless.
The average PC user will have about 27 of these processers running all the time, more than half of them she/he does not need.
Now for a standard PC with maybe a printer & a broadband connection and no fancey networking, routing or any advanced pheriples and wireless devices, the following services should be set as disabled.
To disable a service, double-click it and set the Startup Type drop-down menue as "Disabled" then click "apply" and "ok" and move onto the next.
Automatic Updates
ClipBook
COM+ Event System
Creative Service for CDROM Access (If you have a Creative soundcard)
Cryptographic Services
Distributed Link Tracking Client
Distributed Transaction Coordinator
DNS Client (Do NOT disable if your on a Dial-up internet connection)
Error Reporting Service
HID Input Service
Indexing Service
IPSEC Services
Messenger
MS Software Shadow Copy Provider
NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
Network DDE
Network DDE DSDM
NVIDIA Display Driver Service (For nVIDIA card users)
Performance Logs and Alerts
Portable Media Serial Number
Print Spooler (Only if you dont have a printer)
QoS RSVP
Remote Desktop Help Session Manager
Remote Registry
Routing and Remote Access
Security Accounts Manager
Server
Shell Hardware Detection
Smart Card
Smart Card Helper
System Event Notification
TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
Telnet
Terminal Services
Themes (If you are not bothered about fancey looks for your desktop)
Upload Manager
WebClient
Wireless Zero Configuration
WMDM PMSP Service
WMI Performance Adapter
Workstation
Note that everyones system is differant so dont be wondering why some services in the list above are not on your list.
Now that you have disabled those Windows services, its time to clean up your startup programs and system tray...
1. Hit Start
2. Hit Run
3. Type "msconfig" without the quotes and hit enter
4. Hit Startup tab
5. Click on "Disable All"
6. Press Apply then Ok and answer YES to reboot your PC.
Now you dont have all that junk starting up when Windows starts and I can guarentee you that you'll notice a phonomenol power boost that will be equally as noticable in games.
Optimising your Windows Page file.
Windwows uses whats called a pagefile to act as RAM for file swapping duties and the-like & is vital for games.
The pagefile itself is harddrive space taken off your harddrive and kept in the pagefile itself so for example if my harddrive is 20GB and I set my pagefile to 1GB then my HDD would suddenly become 19GB in size.
To edit Windows pagefile...
1. Click Start
2. Click Control panel
3. Click System
4. Click Advanced tab
5. Click "Settings" for the "Performance" section
6. Click Advanced tab
7. At the bottom, click "Change"
8. Check the "Custom Size" box
9. Set your pagefile usng the following table
128MB of RAM -> set to 1500MB
256MB of RAM -> set to 1000MB
512MB of RAM -> set to 700MB
1GB of RAM -> set to 500MB
Cleaning up your system
Now its time to give your system a spring-clean and free from unused invalid light bulb that litters many PC users systems and over time can lead to configuration problems and nasty software conflicts and slightly slow application response rates.
You'll need to downlaod the following free programs and install them...
Ad-Aware
Spybot S&D
Reg Seeker
Light bulb Cleaner
Cacheman (A must-have utility for people with 512MB RAM or less)
Hijack This
Now then, to get the most out of these program, you must configure them correctly...
Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D are pretty well configured to begin with so i'll go straight to light bulb Cleaner...
1. Open light bulb Cleaner
2. Click Windows tab
3. Tick all boxes except "Menue Order Cache & Windows Size/Location Cache
4. Click Applications tab
5. Tick everything
6. Click Issues tab
7. Click everything
8. Click Options button
9. Click Settings tab
10. Uncheck the box that reads "Only delete files in Windows Temp folder older than 10 days"
11. Click ok and exit the program.
Now open Cacheman...
1. Click on the Settings button
2. Click the "RAM" icon
3. Under "Memory Ammount", set it to "User defined" then move the slider as far to the right as it goes
4. Uncheck all four boxes but leave "Extreme recovery mode" checked
5. Click the "Optimization" tab at the top
6. Check both "Disable executive paging" & "Unload DLL's from memory"
7. Exit the program and answer "yes" to save settings and answer yes to the reboot prompt.
Ok now that you've tweaked your programs to work at there best, its now time to use them...
NOTE: No other programs should be running while you run the programs so bookmark this page and exit IRC or whatever other programs you have running and come back here when your done.
Open and run the following programs in the following order...
Ad-Aware
Spybot S&D
light bulb Cleaner
Reg Seeker
Hijack This
Ok now your back, your PC should be alot more clutter free but these programs never do a complete job of it so its now time to manually clean your Windows up...
1. Look on your desktop and delete any icons & shortcuts that you no longer need or use or have its software uninstalled
2. Go into your start menue and do the same thing
3. Go into Control panel
4. Go into Add or Remove programs
5. Uninstall any programs that you no longer use or want from the list
6. Go into your Program Files folder typically located at C:Program Files
7. Delete all files and folders that relate to programs or games you uninstalled or do not want any longer
Configuring your systems BIOS for maximum gaming power.
Accesing your systems BIOS varies from PC to PC but typically its a good 10 second hammering of the Del or F1 key while Windows is booting up.
BIOS vary from motherboard to motherboard but modern gaming boards will have alot more options in them than basic motherboards like Dell PC's have which is why i'm not going to be specific, rather just point out the general things to change that I think most PC's will have.
AGP Aperture size should be set to the highest possible.
AGP mode should be set to 8.0 or how high it can go
AGP Fastwrite should be enabled
USB 2.0 controller mode should be set to "Fullspeed" if you have USB 2 ports on your PC
Any performance enhancing options that many, many gaming boards have should be set to there maximum for example my Asus K8V SE board has an option where I can set the overall speed of my PC to "slow", "normal", "fast" or "turbo". Obviously the Turbo option is going to produce more thermal output on my CPU, RAM & motherboard but its not really enough to worry about especially if you have fans in your case.
Updating your system drivers.
Updating your systems drivers is vital for squeezing as much performance out of it as possible, especially sound card and graphics card drivers.
Here is a list of driver links for the differant components from all the major manufactuers...
Graphic Cards
nVIDIA
ATI
Sound cards
Creative Soundblaster
Windows Updates
1. Hit Start
2. Click on Windows Update icon
Now it will take you to the Microsoft website and will scan your system and come up with a list of reccoemnded updates.
Alot of these updates are rubbish and unncessary. I cannot be specific about what not to downlaod and what to download since everyones PC is differan but updates such as language packs and stuff like that.
Critical update patches for Windows Media player and stuff like that should be downloaded and so should Microsoft .NET framework since alot of software nowadays relies on this code.
Remember that uninstalling previous drivers before installing new ones is highly reccomended since it ensures a bug-free crashless install.
Here's how to PROPERLY uninstall drivers...
1. Go into add/remove programs
2. Uninstall the driver you want from the list
3. GO into your Program Files folder and delte all folders and files associated with the driver you have just uninstalled
4. Delete any start menue entries associated with the deleted driver
5. Run Reg Seeker
6. Run light bulb Cleaner
7. Reboot your system and then install the latest driver
I would of made links to motherboard drivers but I find updating mobo drivers to be quite a risky and an often unsucsesfull procedure and to cover it in this guide would take up far too much time.
If you would like to update your BIOS, there are many guides out there, one I reccomend would be BIOS Guide from the trusty tweaktown.com website which I highly reccomend also.
Tweaking your nVIDIA card.
1. Right-click on your desktop & select Properties
2. Click Settings tab
3. Click advanced button
4. Click on the tab that reads your graphics card name, i.e GeForce FX 5600 for me.
5. On the pop-up menue on the left, click on Performance & Quality"
6. Set Antialiasing to off
7. Set Anisotriopic filtering to off
8. Set Image quality to high and if your card is good then set to maximum
9. Set v-sync to off
10. Set Force Minimaps to "none"
11. Set Conformant texture clamp to off
12. Go into the Direct 3D section
13. Set Max frames to render ahead to 0
Tweaking ATI Card
After installing ATI Tray Tools (will be reffered to as "ATT" from now on), launch the application and you will notice it will load into the system tray (bottom right of the screen). After it has fully-loaded, right-click on the icon to get the context-menu which contains all of ATT's features.
To start, I recommend customizing some settings to squeeze the maximum performance out of your graphics card:
Under Direct3D and OpenGL look for the "Texture Preference" and "Mipmap Detail Level" options. They should default to High Quality. You can use lower quality versions to gain a FPS benefit whilst losing a small amount of image quality. For example, try setting "Texture Preference" to Performance and "Mipmap Detail Level" to Quality as a balance between performance and image quality. If you want the maximum performance, set them both to High Performance and then increase them if you notice the textures are too dull or you are getting artifacts.
Make sure that under Direct3D that Catalyst A.I is at least set to Low, never turn it off no matter what. I highly recommend to set it to High to improve performance and you can judge the image quality difference. These are a group of display optimizations but some game-specific optimizations also depend on Catalyst A.I being at atleast Low.
Again, under the Direct3D section, go to the "Optimizations" area and make sure both "Anisotropic Filtering" and "Trilinear Filtering" optimizations are ticked.
The next setting in this area is Flip Qeue Size (the same as maximum pre-rendered frames in NVIDIA card settings). Higher values will increase the amount of frames the CPU can prepare before they are processed by the GPU. Higher value settings are more likely to increase average FPS, but also induce extra input lag. The default is undefined. On a balance between input responsiveness and FPS/graphic smoothness, I recommend to set it to 3. Experiment with higher values to increase FPS. On the flip side, if you're experiencing a lot of input lag, try lower values like 2 or 1, but this is likely to reduce FPS and make the game feel "jerky".
Under Tweaks open up Standard Tweaks:
-Geomtry Instancing (make sure this is ticked)
-Fast Z Clear Enable (make sure this is ticked)
-WMV Acceleration (under "System" tab, make sure this is ticked)
-Disable Block Write (under "System" tab, unticking will increase the speed that data is written to VRAM but usually reduces overall performance as usually data will be stuck in qeue, make sure this is TICKED)
-Z Mask Enable (this option is enabled by default to stop the z-buffer from being filled with useless information. Many people report overall increased FPS when this setting is unticked. I recommend to experiment and UNTICK this setting to see if you get a performance increase).
Under Tweaks open up Advanced Tweaks:
Select Advanced D3D Settings from the drop-menu list:
There are three settings for each value:
Blank = Disabled
Faded Checkmark = No value
Checkmark = Enabled
I recommend to put a checkmark in these settings:
-All settings under "Fog"
-All settings under "Additional Tweaks" except for Line AA
-All settings under "Tiling Settings"
Settings like "compress stencil buffer" and "color compression" will allow more data to fit into VRAM (and to be accessed faster) without reducing image quality in any noticeable manner.
Switch to Multi-Threading (experimental) in the drop-menu at the top.
To start with, tick "Enable MT support" and set the minimum threads to 1 and the maximum threads to 2. This should be especially beneficial on multi-core/multi-thead CPU's. You can also try to increase the maximum threads higher, for example if you have a quad-core CPU try a maximum value of 4.
Your card is now set to give the best balance of image quality and performance.
Tips
1. Run them programs often, especially when you've been making alot of changes or have been installing/uninstalling alot of sfotware on your PC.
2. Run Cacheman before you play games and recover as much RAM as possible so you can get smoother gameplay.
3. Setting games to "High CPU Priority" in Windows Task Manager can sometimes give noticable performance gains.
4. Try to keep your files and folders organized so that your PC is as clutter free as possible.
5. Exit all programs and applications such as MSN messanger or IRC before you play games to maiximise gaming performance.
Enjoy!
Windows XP has came with quite a few new but extremly useless and memory hogging features that constantly run in the background and slow your system down.
Some of the features that should be disabled are automatic updates, system restore and remote assistance.
To disable these 3 fairly useless services...
1. Hit Start
2. Select Control Panel
3. Select Performance and Maintenance
4. Select System
5. Select System Restore Tab
6. Check "Turn off System Restore"
7. Select Automatic Updates tab
8. Select "Turn off autoamtic updates"
9. Hit the Remote tab
10. Uncheck "Remote Assistance" & "Remote Desktop
Now that the three main WIndows features that severly hog your PC's power are disabled, its time to move onto the numerous other Windows processers that further drag down your system.
1. Hit start
2. Select Control Panel
3. Select Adminastrative Tools
4. Select Services
Now there should be a large list of services and alot of them are running on your system right now.
Alot are vital for running Windows and alot are completely useless.
The average PC user will have about 27 of these processers running all the time, more than half of them she/he does not need.
Now for a standard PC with maybe a printer & a broadband connection and no fancey networking, routing or any advanced pheriples and wireless devices, the following services should be set as disabled.
To disable a service, double-click it and set the Startup Type drop-down menue as "Disabled" then click "apply" and "ok" and move onto the next.
Automatic Updates
ClipBook
COM+ Event System
Creative Service for CDROM Access (If you have a Creative soundcard)
Cryptographic Services
Distributed Link Tracking Client
Distributed Transaction Coordinator
DNS Client (Do NOT disable if your on a Dial-up internet connection)
Error Reporting Service
HID Input Service
Indexing Service
IPSEC Services
Messenger
MS Software Shadow Copy Provider
NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
Network DDE
Network DDE DSDM
NVIDIA Display Driver Service (For nVIDIA card users)
Performance Logs and Alerts
Portable Media Serial Number
Print Spooler (Only if you dont have a printer)
QoS RSVP
Remote Desktop Help Session Manager
Remote Registry
Routing and Remote Access
Security Accounts Manager
Server
Shell Hardware Detection
Smart Card
Smart Card Helper
System Event Notification
TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
Telnet
Terminal Services
Themes (If you are not bothered about fancey looks for your desktop)
Upload Manager
WebClient
Wireless Zero Configuration
WMDM PMSP Service
WMI Performance Adapter
Workstation
Note that everyones system is differant so dont be wondering why some services in the list above are not on your list.
Now that you have disabled those Windows services, its time to clean up your startup programs and system tray...
1. Hit Start
2. Hit Run
3. Type "msconfig" without the quotes and hit enter
4. Hit Startup tab
5. Click on "Disable All"
6. Press Apply then Ok and answer YES to reboot your PC.
Now you dont have all that junk starting up when Windows starts and I can guarentee you that you'll notice a phonomenol power boost that will be equally as noticable in games.
Optimising your Windows Page file.
Windwows uses whats called a pagefile to act as RAM for file swapping duties and the-like & is vital for games.
The pagefile itself is harddrive space taken off your harddrive and kept in the pagefile itself so for example if my harddrive is 20GB and I set my pagefile to 1GB then my HDD would suddenly become 19GB in size.
To edit Windows pagefile...
1. Click Start
2. Click Control panel
3. Click System
4. Click Advanced tab
5. Click "Settings" for the "Performance" section
6. Click Advanced tab
7. At the bottom, click "Change"
8. Check the "Custom Size" box
9. Set your pagefile usng the following table
128MB of RAM -> set to 1500MB
256MB of RAM -> set to 1000MB
512MB of RAM -> set to 700MB
1GB of RAM -> set to 500MB
Cleaning up your system
Now its time to give your system a spring-clean and free from unused invalid light bulb that litters many PC users systems and over time can lead to configuration problems and nasty software conflicts and slightly slow application response rates.
You'll need to downlaod the following free programs and install them...
Ad-Aware
Spybot S&D
Reg Seeker
Light bulb Cleaner
Cacheman (A must-have utility for people with 512MB RAM or less)
Hijack This
Now then, to get the most out of these program, you must configure them correctly...
Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D are pretty well configured to begin with so i'll go straight to light bulb Cleaner...
1. Open light bulb Cleaner
2. Click Windows tab
3. Tick all boxes except "Menue Order Cache & Windows Size/Location Cache
4. Click Applications tab
5. Tick everything
6. Click Issues tab
7. Click everything
8. Click Options button
9. Click Settings tab
10. Uncheck the box that reads "Only delete files in Windows Temp folder older than 10 days"
11. Click ok and exit the program.
Now open Cacheman...
1. Click on the Settings button
2. Click the "RAM" icon
3. Under "Memory Ammount", set it to "User defined" then move the slider as far to the right as it goes
4. Uncheck all four boxes but leave "Extreme recovery mode" checked
5. Click the "Optimization" tab at the top
6. Check both "Disable executive paging" & "Unload DLL's from memory"
7. Exit the program and answer "yes" to save settings and answer yes to the reboot prompt.
Ok now that you've tweaked your programs to work at there best, its now time to use them...
NOTE: No other programs should be running while you run the programs so bookmark this page and exit IRC or whatever other programs you have running and come back here when your done.
Open and run the following programs in the following order...
Ad-Aware
Spybot S&D
light bulb Cleaner
Reg Seeker
Hijack This
Ok now your back, your PC should be alot more clutter free but these programs never do a complete job of it so its now time to manually clean your Windows up...
1. Look on your desktop and delete any icons & shortcuts that you no longer need or use or have its software uninstalled
2. Go into your start menue and do the same thing
3. Go into Control panel
4. Go into Add or Remove programs
5. Uninstall any programs that you no longer use or want from the list
6. Go into your Program Files folder typically located at C:Program Files
7. Delete all files and folders that relate to programs or games you uninstalled or do not want any longer
Configuring your systems BIOS for maximum gaming power.
Accesing your systems BIOS varies from PC to PC but typically its a good 10 second hammering of the Del or F1 key while Windows is booting up.
BIOS vary from motherboard to motherboard but modern gaming boards will have alot more options in them than basic motherboards like Dell PC's have which is why i'm not going to be specific, rather just point out the general things to change that I think most PC's will have.
AGP Aperture size should be set to the highest possible.
AGP mode should be set to 8.0 or how high it can go
AGP Fastwrite should be enabled
USB 2.0 controller mode should be set to "Fullspeed" if you have USB 2 ports on your PC
Any performance enhancing options that many, many gaming boards have should be set to there maximum for example my Asus K8V SE board has an option where I can set the overall speed of my PC to "slow", "normal", "fast" or "turbo". Obviously the Turbo option is going to produce more thermal output on my CPU, RAM & motherboard but its not really enough to worry about especially if you have fans in your case.
Updating your system drivers.
Updating your systems drivers is vital for squeezing as much performance out of it as possible, especially sound card and graphics card drivers.
Here is a list of driver links for the differant components from all the major manufactuers...
Graphic Cards
nVIDIA
ATI
Sound cards
Creative Soundblaster
Windows Updates
1. Hit Start
2. Click on Windows Update icon
Now it will take you to the Microsoft website and will scan your system and come up with a list of reccoemnded updates.
Alot of these updates are rubbish and unncessary. I cannot be specific about what not to downlaod and what to download since everyones PC is differan but updates such as language packs and stuff like that.
Critical update patches for Windows Media player and stuff like that should be downloaded and so should Microsoft .NET framework since alot of software nowadays relies on this code.
Remember that uninstalling previous drivers before installing new ones is highly reccomended since it ensures a bug-free crashless install.
Here's how to PROPERLY uninstall drivers...
1. Go into add/remove programs
2. Uninstall the driver you want from the list
3. GO into your Program Files folder and delte all folders and files associated with the driver you have just uninstalled
4. Delete any start menue entries associated with the deleted driver
5. Run Reg Seeker
6. Run light bulb Cleaner
7. Reboot your system and then install the latest driver
I would of made links to motherboard drivers but I find updating mobo drivers to be quite a risky and an often unsucsesfull procedure and to cover it in this guide would take up far too much time.
If you would like to update your BIOS, there are many guides out there, one I reccomend would be BIOS Guide from the trusty tweaktown.com website which I highly reccomend also.
Tweaking your nVIDIA card.
1. Right-click on your desktop & select Properties
2. Click Settings tab
3. Click advanced button
4. Click on the tab that reads your graphics card name, i.e GeForce FX 5600 for me.
5. On the pop-up menue on the left, click on Performance & Quality"
6. Set Antialiasing to off
7. Set Anisotriopic filtering to off
8. Set Image quality to high and if your card is good then set to maximum
9. Set v-sync to off
10. Set Force Minimaps to "none"
11. Set Conformant texture clamp to off
12. Go into the Direct 3D section
13. Set Max frames to render ahead to 0
Tweaking ATI Card
After installing ATI Tray Tools (will be reffered to as "ATT" from now on), launch the application and you will notice it will load into the system tray (bottom right of the screen). After it has fully-loaded, right-click on the icon to get the context-menu which contains all of ATT's features.
To start, I recommend customizing some settings to squeeze the maximum performance out of your graphics card:
Under Direct3D and OpenGL look for the "Texture Preference" and "Mipmap Detail Level" options. They should default to High Quality. You can use lower quality versions to gain a FPS benefit whilst losing a small amount of image quality. For example, try setting "Texture Preference" to Performance and "Mipmap Detail Level" to Quality as a balance between performance and image quality. If you want the maximum performance, set them both to High Performance and then increase them if you notice the textures are too dull or you are getting artifacts.
Make sure that under Direct3D that Catalyst A.I is at least set to Low, never turn it off no matter what. I highly recommend to set it to High to improve performance and you can judge the image quality difference. These are a group of display optimizations but some game-specific optimizations also depend on Catalyst A.I being at atleast Low.
Again, under the Direct3D section, go to the "Optimizations" area and make sure both "Anisotropic Filtering" and "Trilinear Filtering" optimizations are ticked.
The next setting in this area is Flip Qeue Size (the same as maximum pre-rendered frames in NVIDIA card settings). Higher values will increase the amount of frames the CPU can prepare before they are processed by the GPU. Higher value settings are more likely to increase average FPS, but also induce extra input lag. The default is undefined. On a balance between input responsiveness and FPS/graphic smoothness, I recommend to set it to 3. Experiment with higher values to increase FPS. On the flip side, if you're experiencing a lot of input lag, try lower values like 2 or 1, but this is likely to reduce FPS and make the game feel "jerky".
Under Tweaks open up Standard Tweaks:
-Geomtry Instancing (make sure this is ticked)
-Fast Z Clear Enable (make sure this is ticked)
-WMV Acceleration (under "System" tab, make sure this is ticked)
-Disable Block Write (under "System" tab, unticking will increase the speed that data is written to VRAM but usually reduces overall performance as usually data will be stuck in qeue, make sure this is TICKED)
-Z Mask Enable (this option is enabled by default to stop the z-buffer from being filled with useless information. Many people report overall increased FPS when this setting is unticked. I recommend to experiment and UNTICK this setting to see if you get a performance increase).
Under Tweaks open up Advanced Tweaks:
Select Advanced D3D Settings from the drop-menu list:
There are three settings for each value:
Blank = Disabled
Faded Checkmark = No value
Checkmark = Enabled
I recommend to put a checkmark in these settings:
-All settings under "Fog"
-All settings under "Additional Tweaks" except for Line AA
-All settings under "Tiling Settings"
Settings like "compress stencil buffer" and "color compression" will allow more data to fit into VRAM (and to be accessed faster) without reducing image quality in any noticeable manner.
Switch to Multi-Threading (experimental) in the drop-menu at the top.
To start with, tick "Enable MT support" and set the minimum threads to 1 and the maximum threads to 2. This should be especially beneficial on multi-core/multi-thead CPU's. You can also try to increase the maximum threads higher, for example if you have a quad-core CPU try a maximum value of 4.
Your card is now set to give the best balance of image quality and performance.
Tips
1. Run them programs often, especially when you've been making alot of changes or have been installing/uninstalling alot of sfotware on your PC.
2. Run Cacheman before you play games and recover as much RAM as possible so you can get smoother gameplay.
3. Setting games to "High CPU Priority" in Windows Task Manager can sometimes give noticable performance gains.
4. Try to keep your files and folders organized so that your PC is as clutter free as possible.
5. Exit all programs and applications such as MSN messanger or IRC before you play games to maiximise gaming performance.
Enjoy!
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