How to optimize your system 101 (help needed)
 

I am running the following:

WIN XP Home
1.7 ghz
512 RAM
64mb GeForce 3Ti 200
Sound Blaster Live! Value

Ok well here goes. I am unsatisfied with my system's performance. I reinstalled Windows in January and it seemed to run better for a little while, but overall it seems slow again.

I used a tool from MadOnion to check my system's performance for gaming vs others who had a similar system. With the same specs, everyone else was blowing my doors off.

What I want to know is what types of steps I can take to optimize my performance for gaming? I am going to buy Warcraft 3 TFT tomorrow and I would like to make sure I am running as smooth as possible when I get it.

Before telling me what to do, try to keep this in mind, I have a limited (nonexistant) budget right now and so I am looking for settings to tweak and not hardware to buy. I will likely try to buy a whole new system in 9 months or so and build it from the ground up (at which point I will start a new thread for advice). For now please help me with anything you know might work.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Have you tried disabling all of Win XP's unnecessary eye candy features? Got the right amount of virtual memory? (common practice is to have about as much VM as actual physical memory). Checked to see you haven't got too many programs that load up upon boot? I find with my windows systems that I really need to reinstall at least once every 12 months to keep it feeling fresh.

I am not sure where to go to adjust VM. Can someone tell me? Good advice though.

As far as programs running, I am not sure I have killed everything, but I did a decent job for a layman. If you have any ideas on how to check for or disable more stuff, let me know. Startup is empty and there are not many things in the toolbar near the clock.

Can you give some examples of eye candy features that I can look at disabling?

Thanks for the help so far. Keep it coming.

run scan disk and defrag, should help a lil bit

To adjust things - go to Control Panel > System > Advanced > Performance Settings

For visual effects, click on adjust for best performance.

then in the advanced tab there should be a button to tweak VM settings down the bottom.

Also don't forget to make sure that the most up to date drivers are installed for all your hardware - I've seen slow-downs because of this.

Ok - I am on top of Defrag and Scan Disk all the time so that helps.

I adjusted for best performance and so we will see how that works. The task bars all kinda look like Win 2000 style (ugly) so that may be what you meant about the pretty stuff in XP to turn off in the process. I am unsure if this will help the gaming performance.

Finally I adjusted the VM to 512. It was 768 and it said in the window that 766 was recomended. I have no idea how this will affect things, but I took your advice on what ratio to do this in.

I updated all my drivers about a month ago and updating the sound one really helped. I think there were some bugs that went away from fixing that one. My chipset is up to date and I was afraid to mess with my BIOS although I will if someone thinks it would be good.

I have a second hard drive that has all my imortant files on it(READ: Porn), so having to install XP is not as bad as it sounds.

I would add more RAM if I could, but this stupid MB will only recognise 512 total. bastards.

Anything else anyone can think of?

don't just take my word for it, do a bit of browsing around... I hear that anything from 100% to 150% of your physical RAM is good - So your PC saying 766 was recommended is probably not too far off :) Bear in mind that I haven't really got into gaming for a few years, so I'm not 100% on what will make games run faster.

Tweak your VM to no less than 150% of your actual RAM. Turn off all the eye candy of XP. Disable services according to the guide found here. Use caution when disabling services... Make sure you have a decent idea of what you're doing. Get RegScrubXP and clear out all the shit from the registry. The automation of that program is awesome. Outside of that... Get XP Pro.

overclock your system.

don't ask me how, I don't know. sorry.

You could always play in a smaller resolution.

Here's my 2 cents worth :

1) Ensure you're running only the minimal stuff.

- Run regedit. Search for "runonce". Look for the "Run", "Runonce" or "RunonceEx" sections. These are the sort of things that load when windows start up. Delete those entries that are not necessary. Oh. Might wanna back it up before you do that.

- Check Administrative Tools -> Services. Stop the services which you deem unnecessary. Set it to "Manual" so that it doesn't start up at boot time. Careful here. See Shinryu's reply above.

2) Try not to mess with the virtual memory. If your system is banging on the VM heavily, it probably means that you've got too much processes running ... until it pages like a ... nevermind. If you limit the virtual memory, things (the processes) might just bomb out. If you ask me general rule of the standard swap size = 2x physical memory.

Your specs are pretty ok actually. Not too great of a graphics card. But. It's cool ...

Finally, if you really want to; consult your motherboard manual on the BIOS features and shit. There might be opportunity to tune it there.

Good luck.

I agree that the specs are okay - I just think it should be running better than it is. I will mess with the regedit things and see how I do. Like I said - if I mess it up it will give me a good excuse to re-install windows.

The only thing is that I am not sure if this is it. I mean you guys are telling me that the fellows that were blowing my doors off with the same card and equipment just were good at fixing their processes and making sure that nothing else was running?

Ha ha! not necessarily. maybe they don't install anything much. maybe they re-install windows regularly. who knows?

maybe they don't have that much porn.

mine? Well. when I'm not looking, the thing starts to wank off under the cover of a blank screensaver. then after a while, it finally gets exhausted and hibernates itself. It does this all the time. And when I want to do something constructive (read: view porn); it's slow as hell!

bastard computer. I should've gave it a more gentler computer name than "Rock_HARD".

This site will help you alot.

http://www.tweakxp.com/

How bad was your score? Cuz I think I'm worse. I got a 268 with a new computer about a month old...that's a P4 2.8 w/ HT!

Make sure you have the most up to date BIOS for your motherboard, and some of the settings in there can have major effects on performance. Go to http://www.rojakpot.com/ for the most complete explanation of what all the settings mean. Also if it's an VIA-chip based AMD motherboard, you're gonna want to have the most up to date VIA 4-in-1 drivers installed (ver. 4.48, get 'em at http://www.viaarena.com )

Whale - 440 and Shokan - I will work on those and report back to you. That stuff scares me a little, so I will do some backing up and let you know my progress.

I have visited Tweak XP before but never really did much about it b/c I thought I would break more than I would fix

<i>Mondak</i> before you go nuts with your virtual ram settings, just do as others have said about ridding yourself of fluff startups. Use <i>msconfig</i> from the start/run/msconfig menu and use your judgement.

Windows is a memory manager so it will, of course, gobble up your ram. It is supposed to. It will allocate as it feels necessary so, using your judgement, determine what you need to run. However, much of the fluff is minimal, your anti-virus monitoring, and other add-ons take more resources than other standard drains. One of the biggest wastes I can think of off hand is file indexing. This helps XP and 2000 search quicker, supposedly, and continually monitors your drives. You might see times when your drives are reading, yet you are doing nothing. That is most likely indexing. Shut it off.

Also, the specs you read were from machines finely tuned solely for gaming by people that strive for that last fps. With your specs, you should game fine until your budget changes.

Hope my thoughts helped you.

Man Poof - that was some great advice. I guess the curious side of me looked at "machines that are set up solely for gaming" and then wondered what you would do to set up a machine just for this. Then I can apply the settings that I find useful to my machine and get a decent balance.

Make sure your virtual memory isn't fragmented on the drive (with 512mb you have enough to turn it off briefly, defragment, and then create new settings with the min & max values the same so it doesn't scribble all over the place!)

ya my computer was running slow too and i did the start>run>msconfig thing and i had a lot of stuff running at startup that just take up a lot of resources. The ones i have noticed most are the quicktime stuff and like kazaa.

BTW how do you turn off file indexing, i just formatted recently and cant remember how to turn it off.

right click on your HD and unclick allow indexing service

thanks

do a goole on "xp smoker" it costs about 10 bucks. You get about 3 + uses before you have to pay....It found 37 services I wasn't using.... much much more to it... check it out, well worth it.

Was the program you downloaded from MadOnion called 3dMark? The people that post their scores on that may be using the same specs as your computer, but you can bet they're all overclocked. :)

Scott

get a nice spyware removal tool and scan your computer. as for defragging, maybe try out a program called O&O defrag, it can optimize your harddisk A LOT better than xp's defrag.