Tom's Hardware > Forum > Homebuilt Systems > General Homebuilt > How have you configured your OS?
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waldo_ii   04-20-2008 at 01:01:16 AM

When you installed XP/Vista on your gaming rig, did you do anything special, or was it a normal install?

I recently reinstalled XP on my gaming computer (I built a second computer for work, and all of my old work on my gaming PC was slowing it down), and when I did so I decided to configure XP to be as fast as possible. I have four partitions on there: 20gig for Windows/Punkbuster/nVidia drivers, 115gig for games, 5gig for the page file (I am only using 3gig), and 10gig for random documents, programs, etc.
I also cut down as much as I could in the OS too. I no longer have MS Paint, Solitare/Minesweeper/Hearts etc., MSN Messenger, anything that I could remove has been. I have no desktop image, I am using the Redmond theme (as minimalistic as possible. It is ugiler than Win98- no shadows, extra effects, nothing.), and I defrag obsessively (I use the built in defrag tool because 3rd party defraggers would be unnecessary bloat).
I also am using IE6 for the very, very few times when I need to browse the Internet. IE7 is clunkier, and I don't dare slow my machine down with Firefox. I also download everything on a different computer and use a flash drive/DVD to move files over.


I'm interested in what any of you have done.

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dagger   04-20-2008 at 01:30:24 AM
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I have done nothing. Full aero in 64bit Vista. When in games, things on desktop like Aero isn't running anyway. Those things just don't make much of an impact, especially with quad core. One single partition on single 1TB harddisk. No use breaking it into a million pieces. The loadtime difference isn't big enough to justify the inconvience. Hdd doesn't affect in game fps anyway, just load time, which I don't care. Removing things like MS Paint and Minesweeper makes no impact. They're not running anyway, so it's just saving a few MB of hdd space. It's not worth ruining your PC's user experience for mostly unnoticable difference.

 

You shouldn't have gone so far in doing things that hardly make a dent and take care of the obvious big items that you've missed, like disabling page file, and stresstesting for the highest stable overclocking.

------------------------------ Q6600@3.6ghz, GA-EX38-DS4 motherboard, 8gb 800mhz ddr2 4-3-3-12, 8800GTS(g92)@780mhz, 1TB + 1.5TB hdds, 850watt psu
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customisbetter   04-21-2008 at 02:03:22 AM
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when benchmarking i just close unneeded processes. using ie6 is a bit extreme when considering that its not running when playing a game. why don't you just spend your time moving your os files towards the front of your drive? and if you have a second drive then put your games at the fron of that one. that seems as if it would have much more of an effect on performance than getting rid of paint.
my 2cents...

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