Tweak your XP Computer for Gaming

This guide will cover tweaking your computer to (hopefully) improve performance for gaming on Windows XP. Those of you with Vista, Linux, or Macs will either have to wait until I write a guide to help you or just do some Googling (not the bad kind) to find out how to improve performance by yourself.

We will be creating a new hardware profile, disabling some unnecessary services, and performing some basic tweaks and maintenance. None of this is really too hardcore, but if you are worried about the state of your machine, then you may want to perform a backup beforehand, just to be safe.

First off, we need to create a new hardware profile. To do this, either right-click on your “My Computer” icon or go to Start – Control Panel – System. Once you have the System Properties window open, click the “Hardware” tab and click on the button for Hardware Profiles. You are going to want to copy your Default profile (or whatever the original profile is named) and then rename the copy to “Gaming”, “High Performance”, or “RPGX” (really, any name will do). Now, when you boot your computer you will be given the chance to choose which hardware profile to use. Depending on which profile you will be using more often, you can either set it to automatically select the first profile after a given time (default is 30 seconds) or to wait until you select one to continue booting. Now that you have created the new profile, reboot your computer and select your new profile before we go any further.

After you reboot into your new “Gaming” profile, it is time to get to work. The first thing we are going to do is start disabling services that we don’t really need in order to game on a closed network, like at a LAN party. All of these edits are just suggestions and could possibly cause your computer to stop responding or programs to fail. I recommend disabling only a couple at a time and rebooting to make sure that everything still works. If something breaks and you can’t get back into your computer, you will still have your “Default” profile that we can go back to.
Anyway, that’s enough disclaimer, let’s get started.

To access your services, you can go to Start – Run: and type “services.msc” (without the quotes). This will open the Services window that allows you to start, stop, or disable services. We are only going to disable services on the “Gaming” profile, so for each service you want to disable, you will want to right-click on it and choose “Properties”, then go to the “Log On” tab and select the appropriate profile and press the “Disable” button; this way your Default profile remains untouched.

The following are services that you can probably disable safely:
Alerter
Automatic Updates (disabling this will cause Automatic Updates to not function, duh)
Background Intelligent Transfer Service (disabling this will cause Automatic Updates to not function)
Clipbook
Error Reporting Service
Help and Support
Messenger
Netmeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
Portable Media Serial Number
QoS RSVP
Remote Desktop Help Session Manager
Remote Procedure Call Locator
Smart Card
Smart Card Helper
Telephony (if you are on dial up, you will want to leave this enabled)
Telnet
Uninterruptible Power Supply (only if you are not using a UPS)
Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) – (only needed if you are connecting scanners or cameras)
Wireless Zero Configuration (needed if you are on a wireless network)
Fast User Switching
Task Scheduler
Secondary Logon
Print Spooler (are you going to be printing while gaming?)
Indexing Service
Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service
Google Updater Service

If you do not see some of these services in your list, don’t worry. That means they aren’t running and you don’t have to stop them. Did you remember to only disable these on your Gaming profile? Just checking. Disabling all these services that you won’t use should speed up your computer a little since it won’t be trying to run these services (and taking up CPU and RAM) while you are gaming.

Now, for this second bit of tweaking, you may want to create a second User Profile. This tweak will stop certain programs from starting up when you first log on, which means that unless you turn them on, they won’t be running while you are fragging your opponents. To create a new User Profile, go to Start – Control Panel – User Accounts. Select “Create a New Account” and follow the on-screen prompts. You will probably want to make this new user an Administrator so you can run games and install programs properly, but it is really up to you. After you have created the new User, log off and log back in as the new Profile.

Now that you are logged in as your new “gaming” user, go back to Start – Run: and type “msconfig” (again, no quotes). This will open the System Configuration Utility, which should be used sparingly. From here, click the last tab “Startup” to see a list of programs. All the programs that have a check next to them load when your computer first boots up. We are going to disable some programs that we don’t need, but be sure to leave all your Antivirus and Firewall programs alone (if you have them). This list will probably have some programs that you do not, these are just the ones I have seen and am pretty sure that you won’t need when gaming.

The following are some of the programs that you can uncheck:
QTTask (Quicktime)
Picasa Media Detector
Adobe Reader
Microsoft Office
Jusched (Java Updater)
WMPNSCFG (Windows Media Player Network Sharing config)
Yahoo Widgets
Azureus (or any other P2P program like BearShare, LimeWire, Kazaa, BitComet, etc.)
AIM (or any other instant messenger, unless you use them during games)
etc.

Really, the only things that need to remain checked are your Antivirus, Firewall, and any program that you know that you will be using. If your video card came with software that affects your monitor (something like Nvidia, ati, or AdobeGamma) and you see it listed, leave it checked as well. If you uncheck a program here that you need, then you can always go and start it manually later.

Another minor point that might should be addressed ties in with the Startup programs that we turned off earlier. If you have a lot of programs open and then decide to play a game, you might want to go ahead and close them before firing it up. You wouldn’t believe how much memory those little things like Instant Messaging, Office, Acrobat, iTunes, Widgets, internet pages, etc. can take up if you leave them running when you turn on a game. It doesn’t do us any good to make it so these programs don’t start up when your computer boots if you turn them on manually and leave them on while you game.

Ok, also on this profile we are going to tweak the appearance of your normal desktop and Windows. This will not affect anything in how your games appear, but it can make a little difference in your machine’s performance. Right-click on My Computer again and select Properties, but this time we are going to go to the “Advanced” tab. From here, click on the “Settings” button in the “Performance” area to open a new window where you can tweak the Visual Effects of Windows. To get the most out of this tweak, you will need to click the third option “Adjust for best performance”. This will get rid of most of the basic eye-candy on your desktop, but that means that Windows is requiring less RAM, which frees up more for your games.

You can also go to the 2nd tab, “Advanced” and click the “Change” button in the Virtual Memory area to change the amount of Virtual Memory your computer will use. Virtual Memory is what your computer will use if it runs out of RAM. It sets aside a section of your hard drive and uses it as Virtual Memory when your RAM is full. This method is slower than real RAM, but it can help your computer run programs it would normally have problems with. After clicking “Change”, the Virtual Memory window will come up. You will want to select “Custom Size” and type in the same number for both Initial Size and Maximum Size. You will want to type in a number that is about 1.5x the amount of physical RAM your machine has (you can check this by going back to the General tab of the System Properties). For example, if your computer has 512MB of physical RAM, then you want to set your virtual memory to 768MB. Using the same number in Initial and Maximum will keep your computer from constantly changing the size of the virtual memory in the middle of your game.

Don’t forget, another way you can help your machine out before a big gaming session is to do a Disk Cleanup and a Defrag. For Disk Cleanup, you can either use Window’s default application (right-click on your C:, click properties – select “Disk Cleanup”) or use a 3rd party application like CCleaner. Running a disk cleanup will delete old temporary files, cookies, downloaded files, and depending on the application, even compress your files or clean out old registry entries (always back up your registry first!). This means that old crap files that you don’t need anymore will be deleted, thus freeing up room on your hard drive and keeping Windows from having to sift through those files in order to get to the ones you need.

Defragmenting your hard drive should also improve performance. When data is stored in your hard drive, Windows generally tries to store it all together. If there isn’t enough room to put your Unreal Tournament files in one block, then it will break it up into pieces and spread it out on the hard drive so that it fits. This means that when you try to play the game, Windows is having to jump around on the hard drive to access all the files needed, wasting time and resources. Defragging tries to put the files back into continuous blocks so that your machine doesn’t have to pull files from 42 different places in order to play Solitaire. Now, there are many different defrag programs out there including the default one that comes installed with Windows.

The Windows default should be fine for most people, and beware of some of the free ones that might cause more harm than good. Personally, I use the non-free Diskkeeper and have found it to work well for me. Defragging should probably be done on a schedule like once a week or month for average users to keep their machines running better.

Well, those are the basic tweaks for improving your gaming performance on Windows XP. Let me know if they worked or if there was something that gave you a problem and I will try to address it in future articles.