Tweaking XP and Vista.

[Xtreme2damax]

Well heres the deal, I want to tweak the hell out of my XP and Vista installs after a fresh reformat to get better performance in my games without sacrificing visual quality.

I find tweakguides lengthy to read and most of the tweaks time consuming to manually do.

My question is for any info or links on the absolute necessary tweaks to improve Vista and XP performance in PC games and emulation.

Also a freeware program to automatically apply tweaks and automatically configure my install is appreciated. Also some registry hacks and video card and driver tweaks are greatly appreciated.

I don't have time to read an entire tweakguide for most tweaks I probably won't use, so I would appreciate only the bare essential tweaks to improve performance.

Also where are the profile settings stored in ntune or the registry? I have a couple profiles which are listed and can't delete to start new.

Any useful freeware tweaking apps for XP or Vista available as well as overclocking apps?

Also I need to know how to tweak game configuration files properly for maximum performance in my PC games. I've been trying to tweak the my Crysis config files as well as other games, but am a n00b at tweaking them so I wind up with worse performance than before.

Also is there any good modded drivers tweaked for performance for Nvidia cards that aren't a farce or don't offer any benefit?

Thanks for taking the time to help me.

[refraction]

tweaked drivers imo provide little change compared to tweaking an official driver yourself, they just come pretweaked. Personally id prefer to get official drivers.

the best perf boost you can get is from installing the 169.04 drivers, dont get the 169.09's, lost of people have had problems

[MasterPhW]

The best tool for tweaking XP is IMHO TuneUp Utilities... very good tools, with a lot of great tweaking settings... wait a few days and the version 2008 should be released... it's shareware, but you only have to tweak these settings once, so the 30 days limit shouldn't be a problem at all.
For fixing your registry you should try the old RegCleaner (I've only found it on a german download site, but shouldn't be a problem, I think)... it's old as hell but still works great!
For Vista there are two great tools... again shareware only, but you can change all important settings with the try-version, too.
These tools are Vista Manager and TVista... the second one is a only German tool afaik, but it isn't to hard to understand... if you have any problems, just ask!

[S.SubZero]

If you are expecting to change a setting or toggle something and have games gain 10fps with no quality change, that is not going to happen. The actual overhead of the various services in Windows, even the frivolous ones, do not really impact performance. Drivers can influence speed a little, but overall unless it's a 1.0 driver, there won't be much room for improvement without sacrificing something.

On my fresh installs I usually skim over the services and disable stuff I know I don't need. I do not do this so much for any speed benefit, but because I believe that the less that's run, the less that can cause problems.

[jonc2006]

Originally Posted by Xtreme2damax

Well heres the deal, I want to tweak the hell out of my XP and Vista installs after a fresh reformat to get better performance in my games without sacrificing visual quality.

I find tweakguides lengthy to read and most of the tweaks time consuming to manually do.

My question is for any info or links on the absolute necessary tweaks to improve Vista and XP performance in PC games and emulation.

Also a freeware program to automatically apply tweaks and automatically configure my install is appreciated. Also some registry hacks and video card and driver tweaks are greatly appreciated.

I don't have time to read an entire tweakguide for most tweaks I probably won't use, so I would appreciate only the bare essential tweaks to improve performance.

Also where are the profile settings stored in ntune or the registry? I have a couple profiles which are listed and can't delete to start new.

Any useful freeware tweaking apps for XP or Vista available as well as overclocking apps?

Also I need to know how to tweak game configuration files properly for maximum performance in my PC games. I've been trying to tweak the my Crysis config files as well as other games, but am a n00b at tweaking them so I wind up with worse performance than before.

Also is there any good modded drivers tweaked for performance for Nvidia cards that aren't a farce or don't offer any benefit?

Thanks for taking the time to help me.

you probably dont want to hear this but reading tweakguides is probably the best thing you could do for yourself at this point. it took me about 3 or 4 days to finish that XP guide but it was probably one of the smartest things ive done in terms of learning in quite some time. there are alot of registry tweaks i know of but i really dont suggest doing them unless you know what your doing and have a backup of your registry ready beforehand. i find auto-tweakers to be somewhat useless since there is alot of preferance involved in tweaking and those auto programs are too broad for what they offer. one of the other things you can do since you are doing a fresh install is to correctly set up your BIOS. there are guides for this and i warn you, they are much longer than anything tweakguides offers but setting up your BIOS correctly can make a huge difference for some people. check here for a guide on how to do this. be very careful though.

[MiretanK]

TweakVI for Vista, and like PhW said, Tune Up for XP.

[MasterPhW]

Originally Posted by MiretanK

TweakVI for Vista, and like PhW said, Tune Up for XP.

TweakVI is crippled in its free/try version and you can't change a lot settings, most of them you can easily change in Vista with a little search, too! So I wouldn't recommend TweakVI at all.

[Xtreme2damax]

Originally Posted by S.SubZero

If you are expecting to change a setting or toggle something and have games gain 10fps with no quality change, that is not going to happen. The actual overhead of the various services in Windows, even the frivolous ones, do not really impact performance. Drivers can influence speed a little, but overall unless it's a 1.0 driver, there won't be much room for improvement without sacrificing something.

On my fresh installs I usually skim over the services and disable stuff I know I don't need. I do not do this so much for any speed benefit, but because I believe that the less that's run, the less that can cause problems.

I obviously already know that. I'm just looking to tweak XP or Vista for better responsiveness, speed of launching apps and boot time along with slightly better performance.

I'm only looking for slightly better performance for my games and windows. Tweaking my game configuration files, along with tweaking windows and some overclocking should yield me some better performance than I am currently getting. I already know that I won't see a significant increase of 10 FPS like you said. At most I'd be lucky to see a 5 - 6 FPS increase, but that's still pushing it. Even if I were to achieve an extra 5 - 6 FPS that would be good enough for me anyways at this time.

Does anyone know how to delete the profiles for ntune? I'm not talking about the file itself, but the undeletable one listed in ntune when launched under the adjust custom rules section under the performance section in ntune.

I think the profile is stored in a registry key or ini file, which one it is I am unsure of however.

[jonc2006]

Originally Posted by Xtreme2damax

I obviously already know that. I'm just looking to tweak XP or Vista for better responsiveness, speed of launching apps and boot time along with slightly better performance.

I'm only looking for slightly better performance for my games and windows. Tweaking my game configuration files, along with tweaking windows and some overclocking should yield me some better performance than I am currently getting. I already know that I won't see a significant increase of 10 FPS like you said. At most I'd be lucky to see a 5 - 6 FPS increase, but that's still pushing it. Even if I were to achieve an extra 5 - 6 FPS that would be good enough for me anyways at this time.

Does anyone know how to delete the profiles for ntune? I'm not talking about the file itself, but the undeletable one listed in ntune when launched under the adjust custom rules section under the performance section in ntune.

I think the profile is stored in a registry key or ini file, which one it is I am unsure of however.

best thing i can tell you to do then is to disable any and all background applications that are not mandatory for windows to run. this frees up ram as well as work off your cpu and it can be done by using a program called autoruns. another method to disable unneeded services is to go to start>run> and type in "services.msc" without the quotes. once you do that there should be an option to hide all microsoft services, this will hide most of the mandatory services. for faster boot time, i use bootvis. to use it, there is a tab that has an option called something like "next boot + driver delays", select that, let the pc reboot, wait for bootvis to start up automatically, then go to your windows/prefetch folder and delete everything inside it (but dont delete the folder itself). then go back to bootvis and under the same tab that had the 1st option you used, there will be an option to "optimize system for boot performance", select that, let it reboot, wait for it to load and do its thing and then that should get you faster bootup times. keep in mind that i do not think bootvis has any impact on game performance at all, but it does speed up your bootup times pretty good. another thing that could help is to reset your pagefile, if it becomes fragmented it can slow you down. do this by disabling the page file, reboot, then re-enable the pagefile and set it to whatever amount you or windows thinks you need. these are some of the performance utilities i use, some are helpful for games, some are helpful for O/S performance:

bootvis
autoruns
cacheman xp
iobit smartdefrag
nvtweak
page defrag
regcleaner
startup inspector
nt reg optimizer

[runawayprisoner]

The performance boost won't be more than 5%, though, or so I've heard. I've actually tried to install Windows XP with almost nothing except for the drivers, directx, some utilities to administrate as well as configuring your computer... and... there. It used up only 30MB of my RAM, and CPU usage was almost always at 0% (highest at 1% while copying files) when there wa nothing but explorer running... and the speed boost was like... nothing in games. :/ Some applications boosted up faster, but there were a lot of stuffs missing, and some apps didn't run at all.

[jonc2006]

Originally Posted by runawayprisoner

The performance boost won't be more than 5%, though, or so I've heard. I've actually tried to install Windows XP with almost nothing except for the drivers, directx, some utilities to administrate as well as configuring your computer... and... there. It used up only 30MB of my RAM, and CPU usage was almost always at 0% (highest at 1% while copying files) when there wa nothing but explorer running... and the speed boost was like... nothing in games. :/ Some applications boosted up faster, but there were a lot of stuffs missing, and some apps didn't run at all.

it varies from person to person. you might have a background app that i dont have that uses alot of resources or vice versa. no two systems are identical really so its hard to say with certainty what will work and what wont. when i tweaked my system i got around maybe a 5-10% boost. its not much but it adds up.