Nov 26 2007

This is the third and last issue of the DirectX 10 ezine course. If you have missed the first two issues, you can still read it at our BGCG ezine archive.

In this issue, we are going to provide you with 10 useful tips and tricks you can use on your Vista PC to improve your gaming performance.

1. Upgrade your RAM to 2 GB. Vista is a very intensive resource OS. You need to top up your RAM to at least 2 GB to fully utilize its features.
2. Disable System Restore. Vista’s System Restore can slow down your system. To disable it, right-click My Computer and choose Properties. Click the System Protection link and remove the tick next to any drives that you have protected.
3. Turn off hibernation. If you don’t use the hibernation feature, you can disable it and recover around a gigabyte of hard disk space. To do this, go to Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Run. Type ‘powercfg - H off’
4. Disable the Sidebar. While this is a great eye-candy, it takes up a lot of resources. To disable the sidebar, Open Control Panel -> Windows Sidebar Properties. Uncheck the ‘Start Sidebar When Windows Start.
5. Move swap file to another drive/partition. Swap file is a temporary file used to store data for future use. If you have another drive, you can speed up Vista a bit by moving the swap file to that drive. Or if you are using only one drive, you can set up a partition to store your swap file.
• Click on Start -> Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> System
• Choose Advanced system settings from the top left hands side
• Make sure that the Advanced tab is selected
• In the Performance section click Settings
• Click on the Advanced tab
• In the Virtual Memory section click Change
• Uncheck “Automatically manage paging file sizes for all drives“.
• Click on the partition you want to use as a swap partition, select Custom Size, and set the new sizes of your swap file. The recommended size is 2.5 times your RAM size, and my choice is to set the Initial Size and Maximum Size values equal, to get a fixed size swap file.
• Click on the primary partition, check “No paging file” and click Set. This is to prevent Vista from placing a swap file on your primary partition.
• Restart the computer
6. Add 3D sound. The DirectX 10 architecture changed the ways sound is processed in gaming. If you are playing games that use hardware 3D audio effects, most likely you will not hear any sound at all. If you own a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card, you can use ALchemy software to restore your 3D sound setting. Download the ALchemy software from http://www.soundblaster.com/alchemy/.
7. Turn off Vista’s Indexing Engine. The Vista’s Indexing Engine is a useful tool that allows you to search for files easily, however for gaming purpose, it is taking up resources that can affect the gaming performance. To turn it off, type ‘indexing‘ into the Start/Search bar and click the Indexing tool. Click Modify -> Show All Locations to remove any drives or folders that you don’t want to be indexed.
8. Change your Startup program. Type ‘msconfig‘ into the Run box. Click the startup tab and uncheck the box next to any software that you don’t want to run during startup.
9. Use Ready Boost. This is a new feature in Vista that uses an external USB flash drive as a cache and store frequently access data. It can increase the performance up to 10 times. Insert in a USB 2.0 flash drive into your USB port. In the window that pops up, click on the ReadyBoost tab. Select ‘use this device‘.
10. Disable SuperFetch. Another new feature of Vista that utilizes all your free memory to store frequency accessed data. While it is a good feature, it is actually causing more harm to your game performance. Your game needs a lot of free memory to load maps, process AI and so on, while the SuperFetch is constantly taking up free memory to store data. To disable the SuperFetch, go into the Services Console (Start > Run > services.msc) and Stop/Disable SuperFetch, then reboot the computer.

Happy gaming.

Damien