Tweaking Vista for Gaming

Playing games on Windows Vista is a richer than ever experience, thanks to Microsoft’s inclusion of DirectX 10. The only way to experience the mind-blowing possibilities of DirectX 10 is to own Windows Vista. However, the operating system does have a reputation as a system resource hog, with 2GBs of ram being the minimum requirement for it to run smoothly on any system. Microsoft tried to alleviate some of this problem by allowing the system to use USB storage as memory through the ReadyBoost feature, but this options is shaky at best. Here are a few things you can do to improve your gaming performance and ensure you have the best possible graphics with no lag, while using Windows Vista to game.

Aero Glass – There has been much speculation as to whether or not turning this theme off before starting a game will cause you to get better frame rates while you play. This is absolutely false. There’s no performance hit with Aero Glass enabled, because Glass is disabled automatically prior to the game running in DirectX exclusive mode. This even pertains to dual monitors. If your system is powerful enough to run Crysis, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be using Aero Glass.

Sidebar & Animations – The side bar is a neat functional tool, but many gamers find it takes up too much of their valuable memory while gaming. If you want to disable is, simply click the properties tab from the tray icon and select disable. You can turn off the actual bar by right clicking it and then clicking ‘Close Bar’. If you still want to use the sidebar and don’t want to disable it completely, you can set it to have low priority in your task manager. The process is titled ‘sidebar.exe’. You should also never use any CPU meter while you game, as they use WMI which is a very heavy hit on your CPU usage. Animations are also a good thing to get rid of. The Windows animations and thumbnails can be disabled in your advanced system options, under system CP applet. Uncheck the ‘animate windows will min/maxing.’

Networking – If you’re not actively sharing files with other computers on your network, turn off media sharing and public sharing. If your PC is the only one on the network, you should also disable network discovery and offline files. There’s no need for these services to run if you’re not actively using them.