streamline vista- guide to faster gaming?

[Starmonger]

Anyone know of any guides that can tell me which programs/services, and options i need to terminate/change to run vista for gaming? I've never used vista and currently use a bare bones xp. Id like to get the smoothest gaming experience possible, so i don't mind sacrificing the vista eye candy. any guides for this ?

 

[Cuddles]

I'll try and help if I can. The Eye Candy Glass Effect Vista has uses your GPU instead of your CPU which is a lot different than the way XP uses their Desktop environment. All in all the Aero Effect uses less resources than the XP Performance Desktop and by a ratio of 2 to 1 less than the Quality effect of XP. To help you more we as a whole will need some basic information. Try and fill in as much as you can.
CPU?
Motherboard?
Ramm? This will include type, how much, and mhz.
Graphics Card?
HardDrive? What Company and Model Number is best if not at least size and is it Sata or ATA? Do you have two HardDrives?
Monitor?
Sound Card?
OS Type? Vista Home Premium, Ultimate, etc. Is it 32 bit or 64?
This information is always good to have as if you ever have problems you can easily place this so we can have a quick idea on what your system looks like.
Some easy information to help get you started.
The sweet spot for Vista is 4 GB of Ramm. You won't see much difference between XP and Vista till you have reached 2 GB and if you are using 1GB or lower I would recommend moving back to XP as XP performs better at 1 GB and below than Vista.
If you are using a 32 bit Vista you may want to go ahead and pay the $10.00 for Microsoft to send you the 64 bit disks. This will allow you to move up to 4 BG and above in Ramm.
Hard Drives are the bottleneck in speed for any computer. Make sure you have two Hard Drives and that you have placed your Virtual Memory on the Second Drive instead of the main one. This will speed up your system considerably. When looking at Hard Drives weigh all aspects of the Hard Drive including Seek Time, Average Latency, cost, and size.
Graphics Cards are important but if you are using an onboard one right now I would wait to buy one. ATI / AMD is about to release their new Graphics Card onto the Market and by all previews it is smokin fast.
I hope this helped a little.
Also to find some of the information I asked for just go to Control Panel, Classic View, System.

 

[Starmonger]

thanks for the help. i didnt realise that about the hard drives, i do have 2 but i think they're both 7200 speed and i need one for music and one for gaming. should i buy a 3rd rapter drive and keep the os+virtual mem on that? or ?

my system:

core 2 e6600 @3.4, gigabyte ds3, corsiar xms ddr2 4gig slightly underclocked (to keep with the oc ratio thingy), 8800gtx oc'd to 650 core, 1580 shader, 1000 mem... 2 hard drives, both sata2, 1 is hitachi deskstar, other is a western digital caviar, these are roughly 300 gigs, and 180 gigs.

moniter is a 22" widescreen samsung dvi. sound card is creative x-fi extreme music. os: vista ultimate x64.

 

[Cuddles]

VelociRaptor is one of the best HardDrives around and if you can afford it I would go with two. It's actually my next step is to buy two of those. If you can also go up to 8 Gig Ram you can get rid of the VM altogether and that will increase your speed significantly. Some people still make a VM at 512 on the second harddrive because certain applications require VM.
If you can afford only one here is what I would do. I would get a Velociraptor and use that as just a gaming drive with your OS on the 180. I would purchase an external case (I love my setup) and place the 300 gig into that so you can have a way to save your information remotely. You could also use this drive to secure all your information you don't want others to see and just turn it on or off when you need it.
If that doesn't interest you then you can go with a RaiD setup and buy a 2nd 300 Gig and place your OS on the 180 and use the Raid for Gaming.
There is a lot of options with your setup. Place the OS on the 180, Buy 4 more Gig of Ram and do away with Virtual Memory, get a VelociRaptor for gaming, and use the 300 as an external is what I would do. Actually it's pretty much my setup now.