Improve Gaming Performance in Windows Vista Premium?

Answer 1

If you bought Windows Vista Premium and are unhappy with the performance you are getting during gaming, you are not alone. Many owners of Windows Vista Premium have become disillusioned over the operating system’s poor performance when compared to the venerable Windows XP. However, there are some tips that you can follow and some tweaks that you can implement that will make Windows Vista Premium fly like XP used to. You just have to know what to do and what settings to change.

Keep Programs from Loading at Startup

A major contributor to slow performance is the large amount of programs that may be loading at startup, when your computer boots for after a restart or being powered. Each time a program loads, it takes up precious memory and time. One way to fix this is by preventing excess programs from loading when you start Windows Vista Premium. To do this, click on the Start button and then click on Run. In the box, type msconfig and press Ok. After that, choose the Startup tab and then uncheck all of the boxes. Finally, click on Accept and then restart your computer. You should notice that your startup time should be much less than before.

Cripple Aero

Aero is Microsoft’s new user interface. While it looks nice and is a vast improvement over XP’s simple interface, Aero takes a lot of resources, which can slow down your gaming performance. If you’re more concerned about performance than looks, try disabling Aero to maximize your speed. To do this, right click on your desktop and choose Personalize. Next, press the Theme button and select the Windows Classic theme option, which will disable Aero.

Turn off File Indexing

You may have noticed increased hard drive activity since you’ve installed Windows Vista Premium. This extra hard drive activity is a result of Window’s new file indexing service. This feature was designed to keep track of all of the files on your hard drive during real time in order to improve searching. While this may seem like a good idea in theory, most people do not perform searches for files very often. Even when they do, a search does not take more than a few seconds. The file indexing service really is not needed and takes up a lot of resources. You can turn it off by opening Control Panel and navigating to Programs and Features. Click where it says Turn Windows Features On, and uncheck Indexing Service. Click OK and then restart your computer. The indexing service should now be disabled.