Yeyinde":303k7t86 said:
Edit the registry. Simple as that.
You have a particular talent for understatement.
First, run an antivirus and sypware scan with the software of your choice (I prefer
AVG Antivirus (Free Edition) and
Ad-Aware). Make sure you resolve any issues here or you're going to be wasting a lot of time dicking around with other solutions that won't have an impact.
Go to your Add/Remove programs applet in the Control Panel, search through it and uninstall any & all crap you don't use; this will save you HDD space and possibly reduce the number of system services and processes you have running.
Go to your System applet, go to System Restore, and disable it. Go to Advanced->Performance Options->Advanced, go to Virtual Memory, select Custom Size, and set the minimum and maximum to around 2x your physical RAM.
You can also go and disable all system services you don't need or get any use out of, but please, consult a guide before you do this (describing all the system services and whether or not you might want them is too much for a forum post). However in my experience this will not have much impact on more modern systems, especially anything with more than 1gb RAM and a 64-bit processor and it does cause some annoyances.
CCleaner is a handy little doohickey for cleaning up crap and straightening up your registry. It'll search for leftover temp files and other miscellaneous unneeded crap, invalid registry entries, etc. and clean 'em all out for you. The registry fixes in particular can get your PC booting up quicker by a slick margin. As for background processes, you can start by just using MSconfig (go to Start->Run->type msconfig). Oddly enough, msconfig doesn't know where to look for *all* programs starting up go but it's a good start. CCleaner also has a built in startup manager, but it's similarly inexpert. Anyway, I can 100% guarantee you that nothing on the startup list is improving your gaming performance; just shut it all off and reboot, turn it all back on later if you're feeling lonely without all the junk that loads with startup.
Once you've done all of that, it's time to defrag. The reason you do that last is you don't want to defrag before you've done a bunch of stuff that rearranges and deletes stuff on your HDD. The built in defragmenter in windows is fine, but
JKDefrag is a little more advanced and thorough and free to boot.
There are quite a lot of other tweaks that can get you some serious performance gains, but I feel comfortable recommending these ones to almost anyone. If you want to really get your hands dirty, there's always overclocking, but before you go that far research your favorite games and see if there's any performance tuning you can do inside the game's config files. In particular there are tweaks for games built on the Doom engine and for World of Warcraft that can easily double your framerates without major impacts on visual quality (there will be impacts, but for most people they'll be more tolerable than inconsistent and incredibly low framerates). This holds true for almost any game that allows serious customization of the graphics engine from inside a config file, but I get requests for those two quite a bit.
There are also a lot of registry tweaks, driver hacks and so on that you can employ but that once again is way outside the scope of a forum post. You'll just have to research your particular hardware and do some testing and experimentation with different tweak tools until you hit on something that works for you, but be careful or be prepared to reinstall Windows. Good luck, happy tuning.
