Jan 28th 2008

While the best way to improve your game performance is to get the latest hardware around, it is just not feasible to spend money whenever a new hardware or game is launched. Luckily, with a few tweaks on your operating system, you can actually improve your game performance on your existing PC, without having to spend a dime.

1. Defragment your hard disk
   Your OS stores your application in the order that it is installed. When you uninstalled an application, delete or move files around, you leave behind a pocket of empty slot in the hard disk. Over time, as more and more pockets accumulated, the system will have to skirt around these empty space and take a longer path to access the required data. You can easily clear these pockets by defragmenting your hard disk on a regular basis.

2. Install your game on a ‘game-only’ partition
   It is best to assign a new partition or drive for installation of game only. By not sharing the storage space with other application, all your game data are intact in one single location and this faciliates data retrieval. In addition, there will be lesser chances for the partition/drive to be fragemented, thus reducing the frequency you need to perform a defragmentation.

3. End background task before running game.
   There are tons of background activities running without your knowledge and these activities can be great resouce sucker. One great example is your firewall and antivirus software. If your game don’t require you to connect online, turn off your firewall and antivirus. Press ‘Ctrl+Alt+Del‘ to access the system monitor and kill off all unnecessary application. You might want to turn off some of the services and startup programs, but do it with great care as some of these services are essential for the OS to run properly.

4. Run game at a lower resolution
   Unless you have a huge 30 inches LCD monitor and a powerful graphics card, you might want to run the game at a lower resolution. Most games allow you to configure the game setting, such as the screen resolution, anti-aliasing etc. In most gaming PC configuration, turning these features off will not affect the graphics quality to a great extent, but will improve the game performance by at least 10%.

5. Get the latest patch from the game developer site
   It is necessary and advisable to get the latest patch on the game developer website. Most patches include update to run the game smoothly and faster.

   The following tweaks apply to Windows Vista only:

6. Use ReadyBoost
   Ready boost is a technology only applicable in Windows Vista. It makes use of an external flash memory to serves as an additional memory cache. With ReadyBoost, the system does not have to travel to the hard disk so often to access the data.

7. Turn off Vista indexing engine
   The Vista’s Indexing Engine is a useful tool that allows you to search for files easily. However during gaming, it is running in the background and takes up resources that affect the gaming performance. To turn it off, go to Control Panel -> Indexing Option. Click Modify -> Show All Locations to remove any drives or folders that you don’t want to be indexed.

8. 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, open Run and type "services.msc". Select "Stop/Disable SuperFetch", and then reboot the computer.

Hopefully these tips and tricks helps you in improving your gaming experience. If you have any tips and tricks that you want to add on, feel free to email me at bgcg-ezine@build-gaming-computer-guide.com

Meanwhile, happy gaming!