Shutting Down Processes/Aplications before gaming?

Ice Rich

Ice Rich

Ice Rich

Soldato
Joined
3 Dec 2004
Posts
2,639
Hi all,

I don't run many applications at the best of times but I have the usual stuff always running in background:

ATI CCC
Internet Download Manager
Audio Centre
DTools

Do you lot make a point of closing any unnecessary stuff before gaming?
I'm not having any gaming difficulties but just wondered if you like to get the absolute best system efficiency when playing?
 
Last edited:
I keep my gaming PC trim to start with...

I have an old laptop I use for internet, office, etc. stuff, any clutter and keep my gaming PC as clean as possible.
 
Never really understood this, the majority of games are not multi-processor aware so shutting stuff down makes little sense.

I run games with all sorts of apps, even other games still running in the background with no discernable effect on playability.
 
It can make sense - some background tasks can chug a lot of kernel time sometimes unpredictably... last thing you want in the middle of a match is for massive lag caused by AV kicking in and scanning, etc.

Its prolly not so bad today, but back in the day I remember Norton and other AV used to cause the ingame menus in stuff like homeworld to lag for 10-20 seconds each time you opened them - which is a bit of a disaster when your trying to coordinate battle formations...
 
m4cc45 said:
Yes because nobody has ever invented a virus that could be contained in downloadable content for games... oh wait...

:D

M.
Click to expand...

Don't play many games that have downloadable content, and the ones that do I play on respectable servers, not some dodgy cracked German/Russian ones.
 
Rroff said:
It can make sense - some background tasks can chug a lot of kernel time sometimes unpredictably... last thing you want in the middle of a match is for massive lag caused by AV kicking in and scanning, etc.

Its prolly not so bad today, but back in the day I remember Norton and other AV used to cause the ingame menus in stuff like homeworld to lag for 10-20 seconds each time you opened them - which is a bit of a disaster when your trying to coordinate battle formations...
Click to expand...

The first homeworld does things a little strange anyway. You have to completely turn off DEP before you can even run it thesedays.
 
Main pain would be memory. On xp the os only needs to load and take 100 meg but a lot of people will be double or triple that with norton everything clogging crap up

Try enditall and Game Booster
 
I don't close sh[hh] down. Heck I even leave Photoshop open whilst gaming.

Kick ass that's what it is :)
 
I used to trim every service on XP that I could, I never used AV or suchlike and never had a problem.

I used to be able to game very happily on either 10 or 12 total background processes.

Haven't bothered with Windows 7 yet, will do when its released and I know exactly what service does what.
 
Why?

I will be £5 that it makes no difference, has not done since Vista...

The XP days are over, has been for years.
 
I have found that using Gamebooster makes a big difference to Arma II, I can't work out what it is shutting down that makes the difference, but it is quite remarkable.
 
I used to, especially 10 years ago when playing on uni workstations with only 32meg RAM :)
Nowadays I close foreground windows for online gaming but that's about it. Might look into disabling my AV for gaming I suppose, I never used to use any in the old days.
 
Don't bother closing things at all, makes little difference.
I often have firefox, irc, msn, photoshop or 3dsmax open in the background. Even Supreme Commander is fine with that - although I did happen to notice my pc crashes if I am playing supcom, alt tab out, and open 3dsmax! :D
 
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