Vista and Gaming

Devlish

Devlish

Devlish

Soldato
Joined
12 Jan 2004
Posts
5,406
Location
London
All, need some help - I run Vista on my laptop and quite frankly, if I could afford a new version of XP, I would replace it as I know every little tweak to make the OS barely there.

As I cant, has anyone got any guides on reducing this bloated piece of **** so that i can game without stuttering whilst some process goes off on yet another auto check, scan, or just plain fiddling with itself?
 
I find that vista is just as fast as XP (or negligable difference). And that is without any tweaking at all. Secondly, you know of NO tweaks to make "the OS barely there".

No processes go off to do "yet another auto check, scan, or just plain fiddling with itself". Depending on how long you have had vista for, it may be still doing its first disk index (which you could disable the service for), but that's it.
 
Sleepless said:
All, need some help - I run Vista on my laptop and quite frankly, if I could afford a new version of XP, I would replace it as I know every little tweak to make the OS barely there.

As I cant, has anyone got any guides on reducing this bloated piece of **** so that i can game without stuttering whilst some process goes off on yet another auto check, scan, or just plain fiddling with itself?
Click to expand...

What proc/memory/card does your laptop have? Since it sounds like you've never had XP on there how can you know it would be any different? Gaming on laptops normally isn't a great experience unless you get a hulking monstrosity of a desktop replacement/gaming one.
 
I can't tell whether it's the newer games having lazy devs or if it's vista, i think i need a defrag though. It grinds the crap out of my HDD on startup for quite a while (My Raptor sounds like a machine gun for a good 10 mins) and loading things, starting games,etc. Only a 60gb drive, so not full of crap, just games.

Actually, it's pretty obviously a defrag issue lol. Or Kaspersky analyzing every file that gets used.

I think overall they are similar OS's for performance for me though.
 
uvmain said:
vlite will remove all the bloatware for you
Click to expand...

Life Saver! You da man! laughed at this whilst looking for vlite:

Inquirer said:
Vista bloat-stripper released
vLite promises Windows Liposuction

By Nick Farrell: Tuesday, 29 January 2008, 7:06 AM


FREE SOFTWARE which offers to strip down Vista to a pre-post modern, abstract impression of its lardy self, is being distributed like hot cakes on the Internet.

Many in the trade kindly refer to Vista as a bit portly, while others call it a fat bastid, so bloated it makes the drowned corpse of Robert Maxwell look like Mary-Kate Olsen.

To fix this problem vLite, which can be found here, automatically removes a number of non-essential Windows Vista components.

Designed by Dino Nuhagic it reduces the Vista footprint by nearly half. Gone are Windows Media Player, Windows Photo Viewer, MSN Installer, Wallpapers, SlideShow, Windows Mail and all those other utilities which seem like a good idea but probably aren't.

Nuhagic said that removing all the bloat increases the OS's responsiveness and you don't have to tolerate all kinds of things you don't use.

It is believed that the software has been downloaded about 50,000 times which indicates that there is probably a market for a cut down version of Vista.

As Information Week points out the Home Premium and Ultimate editions of Vista need 15 GBs of available disk space for installation. XP only needed 1.5GB for installation of the Professional version.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
The hard-drive activity after start-up will probably be SuperFetch. It loads your most-often used programs and files into RAM, so performance is improved.

A defrag may help that process go quicker/quieter though, so it's worth doing. Use something like Auslogics Disk Defrag or Defraggler, they're free and quite effective.
 
Sleepless said:
errrr...
Click to expand...

Errr what? I'm being 100% serious. Your laptop must suck something rotten to perform much worse in Vista than it does in XP.

crappy article said:
Designed by Dino Nuhagic it reduces the Vista footprint by nearly half. Gone are Windows Media Player, Windows Photo Viewer, MSN Installer, Wallpapers, SlideShow, Windows Mail and all those other utilities which seem like a good idea but probably aren't.
Click to expand...

Ah yes, all those must SERIOUSLY hamper the OS's responsiveness :confused: Or perhaps not.

crappy article again said:
As Information Week points out the Home Premium and Ultimate editions of Vista need 15 GBs of available disk space for installation. XP only needed 1.5GB for installation of the Professional version.
Click to expand...

Wow, GTA4 takes 15GB of space, and GTA1 only took a few hundred MB. I guess GTA4 should have been smaller then?

Or closer to the mark, Windows 3.11 took TENS of MB to install. XP looks pretty bloated in comparison?


The people who vLite (or nLite) their OS, don't really know what they are doing.
 
philjohn said:
What proc/memory/card does your laptop have? Since it sounds like you've never had XP on there how can you know it would be any different? Gaming on laptops normally isn't a great experience unless you get a hulking monstrosity of a desktop replacement/gaming one.
Click to expand...

Cheers for all the advice - its a new laptop, 3gigs, dual core, crap laptop graphics card but im not aiming at GTA4,, should be reasonable performance. I use XP on my desktop and i can get processes running at an absolute minimum. Everytime I play on the laptop im alternating between smooth and .01 fps. Using a process analyser theres often something kicking in, theres 3 pages of processes running and God knows what half of them are. Hopefully, we'll see that list drop down to a minimum with vlite. Much appreciated.
 
paradigm said:
Errr what? I'm being 100% serious. Your laptop must suck something rotten to perform much worse in Vista than it does in XP...the people who vLite (or nLite) their OS, don't really know what they are doing.
Click to expand...

It must be wonderful to be so knowedgeable about everything. Good luck with that, thanks for your comments.
 
I normally find there is a difference on systems that are a couple of years old or more. Vista does run a lot more processes then xp does and takes up more resources (whether or not that's helpful, I'm not going to bother debating) so on slower hardware it will affect other applications. What are the specs of your laptop? As far as tweaking Vista is concerned you could try turning off indexing, but that's the only tweak I currently know. If it is a slower system then it may well be worth dropping down to xp and if the OP is talking about the tweaks that they know for it, it is pretty likely they've used it before.

I'm not an xp fanboy and I like some aspects of vista, what I don't like are the idiots who tell someone that they are a noob if they aren't having such a good experience with Vista. It does run slowly on some computers, get over it. Instead of getting at the person who is asking for help, give them some good advice.

I'm sure someone knows of services in Vista that can be safely turned off whilst improving the speed, XP is the same in that respect.
 
Sleepless said:
It must be wonderful to be so knowedgeable about everything. Good luck with that, thanks for your comments.
Click to expand...
It must be wonderful to be so blissfully happy under your rock. Perhaps you should do some reading up on HOW the OS works, before slating it.
 
TheVoice said:
The hard-drive activity after start-up will probably be SuperFetch. It loads your most-often used programs and files into RAM, so performance is improved.

A defrag may help that process go quicker/quieter though, so it's worth doing. Use something like Auslogics Disk Defrag or Defraggler, they're free and quite effective.
Click to expand...

Cheers. It doesn't help that some games just aren't optimized well (Warhammer Online - Coded poorly, then re-hashed by a French telecoms company who actually don't know anything) i suppose.

I'll reduce some start-up programs too in msconfig, always forget nowadays, used to be a performance junkie, i.e. i don't need O2 broadband helper lol.

Defrag always scared me since a few years back when it "re-allocates" files to make things more efficient, i.e. moving the files you rarely use somewhere else I.E. my entire music back catalogue. lol
 
paradigm said:
It must be wonderful to be so blissfully happy under your rock. Perhaps you should do some reading up on HOW the OS works, before slating it.
Click to expand...

I find things like a life get in the way when a prog can take the tediousness out of it. Good to see youre such a fan though, every OS needs them - although im sure this isnt the place for a discussion on the merits of OS's.
 
paradigm said:
The people who vLite (or nLite) their OS, don't really know what they are doing.
Click to expand...

ROFL

I've been using nlite and vlite for years now, and I *definitely* know what I'm doing. In fact, through my trial and error nlites when I first started using it, I probably know more about the OS internals than most.
 
Vista is the best OS MS have ever made. Its biggest fault is MS enabled too many services by default instead of trimming a few down for different hardware configs. If you cannot get it running smoothly then either:

A: Your hardware is too old & slow.
B: You lack the tech skills to tweak it.

Not going to give a step by step how to do every little thing because if you do not know how to do something then best to leave well alone as you will not have the tech skills to fix if it all goes wrong. Try doing the following:

1: Disable Indexing service. Also make sure you remove the indexes from your HD (right click properties uncheck then apply to all items-this will take a while as well depending on HD speed).

2: Disable Defender & also ensure that Defender is no longer set to startup by running msconfig.

3: Disable system restore & delete any restore points (this is a biggie as if your laptop becomes unbootable or needs repairing you need to boot from the Vista DVD. But in my 18 months experience with Vista a lot of the time you need to do this anyway).

4: Disable hibernation and any other Battery saving features in the power options. Then use Disk Cleanup to delete this file and any other unwanted files (can save around 4Gb HD space).

5: I would also avoid disabling most of the default services as they are there for a good reason . For instance if you disable Superfetch it can stop the Licensing services from working properly which means you get an empty control panel & problems trying to do a lot of stuff after.

6: Avoid Vlite (unless you have an imaging system to quickly put a basebuild back on) as it also makes your Vista so that when MS release SP2 next April there is a good chance it will not even install without a fresh rebuild first. Lot of people had this issue with SP1.

7: After installing SP1 type from a run box or command prompt: Vsp1cln.exe (this removes a lot of SP1 bloat and saves a little diskspace).

8: Obviously Disable UAC.

9: After doing all of this go into your prefetch folder and delete all the .pf extension files then reboot (this ensures its not prefetching unwanted stuff like a one time install or something).

10: Finally as a precaution probably best to re-enable System restore. Then after all of this if it still lags turn off Aero and use a basic desktop theme.

Add more ram (if you can I presume your on the 32 bit os).

Get a Vista ready USB Flashdrive and put your pagefile on it.

Get a faster laptop HDD.
 
Sleepless said:
Using a process analyser theres often something kicking in, theres 3 pages of processes running and God knows what half of them are.
Click to expand...

Google as many of them as you can just to be sure. Laptops tend to come pre-loaded with all kinds of rubbish from most manufacturers, a lot of it mightn't actually be vista itself.
 
Building on AWPC's useful post go into control panel/windows features and disable what u don't use. Also, disable the IP Helper service as it apparently only helps IPv6 which isn't used much at the moment anyway. (Unless of course you do use it, in which case leave it on).
 
Sleepless said:
Cheers for all the advice - its a new laptop, 3gigs, dual core, crap laptop graphics card but im not aiming at GTA4,, should be reasonable performance. I use XP on my desktop and i can get processes running at an absolute minimum. Everytime I play on the laptop im alternating between smooth and .01 fps. Using a process analyser theres often something kicking in, theres 3 pages of processes running and God knows what half of them are. Hopefully, we'll see that list drop down to a minimum with vlite. Much appreciated.
Click to expand...

im on vista 64 bit on my laptop, it has a gforce go 7600(256mb)
i have no probs playing GTR2/GTR evo/race07/motoGP 08/sbk08 on it and the setting are high, they run and look great

so what graphics does your laptop have?, it maybe thats were your problem is
i`d say going to XP wont help u, as its already been said vista is now just as fast as XP gaming wise
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom