Tweak Vista For Gaming

User Interface

Aero Glass – Don’t bother manually turning it off before gaming, if you believe it might case a drop in frame rates; it won’t. There’s zero performance hit.

The above info was Obtained HERE

Glass is automatically disabled when a game runs in DirectX exclusive mode, even on dual monitors – so if you have a system powerful enough for today’s games, there’s no reason not to use Aero glass.

Dual Monitors – If you are using two separate video cards for dual monitors, they *must* be able to use the same driver. e.g. you can’t mix an Ati and nvidia card.

Window Animation – In advanced system options under the system CP applet, uncheck “animate windows while min/maxing”. Then uncheck the fading and sliding.

Disable Thumbnails – In folder options disable “Always show icons, never thumbnails”.

Disable Sidebar – Disable it from starting up in the properties tab of the tray icon. You can turn off the actual “bar” by right clicking and choosing close sidebar

DO NOT USE the included CPU meter, or any others you find online in the gallery – they use WMI which is heavy on CPU use.

RSS feed headlines – it spikes 50-100% CPU usage every few minutes. And if you’re going to use the clock, turn off the seconds hand.

Set sidebar.exe to low priority in task manager.

Start menu- Turn off the window previews.

Autoplay – Disable it for everything in the autoplay CP applet.

Boot/Startup config – As always minimize what starts up on a Windows boot. Configure startup programs (start menu and registry) by using the system configuration utility under administrative tools.

Networking

Turn off “media sharing” and “public sharing” unless you use them. If you only have one PC on your network then disable “network discovery”.

Disable “offline files” from it’s own applet.

Flow Control – In the device manager, for your network adapter, there is an advanced option called “flow control” which is disabled by default. If you’re running a server with heavy networking I/O you may want to enable it.

Windows Applications and Services

Under “turn windows features on or off” – such as tablet PC components, meeting space, fax and scan etc. Uncheck anything you’re *SURE* don’t need.

File system

Indexing frequency – under power options, set it to balanced

By default, windows indexes *everything* in your user folder. That’s a bit over the top for me, so you can modify the exact folders which it indexes in the index properties – since I cant imagine ever needing to quick search for anything else, I’ve limited it to documents, music, pictures and email folders.

Turning the indexer off completely may free up some memory, depending on the size of your index. But it won’t impact general system performance if it’s set up correctly.

Use Readyboost – For a very good FAQ on it, read here

If you want to find out the actual performance of your USB stick for use with readyboost in a command line type in

winsat disk –read –ran –ransize 4096 –drive U (“U” being the actual drive letter of your stick)

winsat disk –write –ran –ransize 524288 –drive U (“U” being the actual drive letter of your stick)

Swap file – Put it on a separate *physical* drive from your OS, apps, and/or games. Preferably in it’s own partition at the beginning of the disk, to keep it as fast as possible.

NOTE: Changing the size will not affect performance, more is not better, and less can be worse.

Hard drive advanced performance – Under the policies tab for your individual hard disks, there is a new option for “advanced performance”. Enable it.

Application Compatibility

Many programs have a bit of difficulty with Vista, but by right clicking the shortcut, you have a few options. First try running in “XP SP2 Compatibility mode” – this fixes many apps outright. If it has issue with the aero glass, you can check “disable desktop composition”, but this will turn glass off for ALL apps while the incompatible app is running. I’ve found only one obscure app that needed this option to run.

CPU/Multiple Core

Affinity – This setting controls which core a program runs on. Since single threaded games can use only one core, it’s ideal to set them only to use only a single core. You can set affinity in the task manager, but it won’t stick across boots. Use ImageCFG to make it permanent.

Priority – how important the program is, and how it should share the CPU. Most programs are set to normal priority, and share equally. Programs with higher priorities naturally dominate the CPU as long as it needs it, and low or idle priorities only use whats left over. With single cores, it was usually best left alone, but dual cores give you more flexibility. Again, you can set it in task manager, but it won’t stick across boots. Note: “low” = “idle” in Vista.

General System Performance – If you have two cores try setting explorer.exe (shell) and audiodg.exe (audio) to high priority.

Optimizing for low end machines

Use a good readyboost stick (corsair turboflash 1gb – $20!)

Drop down to Aero Basic, or classic.

Choose “adjust for best performance” in advanced system settings.

Use classic view in explorer, disable thumbnails

Turn off sidebar, gadgets, and all audio enhancements.

Turn off indexing, system restore, and UAC.

Use Opera instead of Internet Explorer or Firefox, Media Player Classic instead of WMP11.