The diabolical entity known as Windows has finally finished installing and now you’re faced with the daunting task of getting your system ready for gaming. This process obviously involves installing the latest drivers for your devices and your favorite games, but why stop there? A proper gaming system can really benefit from a few simple tweaks to really push the performance as high as it can go. And as an added bonus the system will be more stable and secure for it.
I’ve actually just reinstalled Windows 7 myself and have been going about the fresh installation trying to optimize it any way I can for the better part of the day. This left me with a few interesting techniques to get a much better performing system than on a plain fresh Windows installation and I’ll be sharing those with you in this guide.
Take a peak below and uncover six methods you might not have tried yet to improve your (non-)gaming performance!
Run Windows Update
The Windows Update tool runs automatically after installing Windows and should be spamming your screen with alerts, but just in case you’re not able to find it: it’s listed both in the Start menu under Programs and as an icon in your taskbar. It’s vital to install the important updates listed, but it’s also worth looking into the optional updates which often provide further security and performance enhancements.
Indeed, these Windows updates not only ensure a more secure system, but some also improve the performance, especially for Windows Vista users.
Defragment your drives
After installing all of your applications, drivers, games and updates it’s important to defragment each of your drives. Nearly everything that you’ve installed will be heavily fragmented at this point which results in a severe performance penalty as it takes longer for your system to access the required files to run any applications or games. Defragmentation takes care of all of that.
Windows comes with its own decent defragmentation tool, which can be accessed by going to Computer and right clicking on the drive (C, D, E, etc.) that you want to defragment. Go to the Extra tab, press Defragment Now and wait for it to finish. Then repeat this process for each of your other partitions until they’re all defragmented.
There are also 3rd-party defragmentation tools that tend to provide better results and extra features. I prefer to use the free tool Auslogics Disk Defrag, which can also defragment all partitions simultaneously.
Defragmenting after installing new games and major game updates is also a good practice. Anything new that you install on your system will invariably be fragmented to some degree and as your hard disk fills up this becomes an increasingly troubling problem. It’s entirely possible to have defragmentation be the only difference between a game being unplayable and it running smoothly.
Improving graphics performance/quality
The system you’ve assembled may have one of the best graphics cards on the market, but that’s not much good when the video card drivers are bottlenecking your graphics quality and performance by default. So it’s important to get into those driver settings and change things around to best suit your desires. Now I don’t actually have an ATi/AMD card at the moment so I’ll be covering this from a NVIDIA perspective. The basic idea is the same for ATi/AMD’s graphics cards however.
NVIDIA driver settings can be accessed by right-clicking the desktop and selecting NVIDIA control panel. There are two settings under 3D Settings that you’ll definitely want to change in order to boost your system’s performance. Power management mode should be set to performance so as to keep maximal graphics performance at all time. Similarly, you’ll probably want to set Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration to single display performance mode, because multiple display mode is only useful if you hook the system up to multiple screens.
Should you have a high powered beast of a video card, then you’ll also want to mess with the other 3D Settings. Set Anisotropic Filtering to 16x, Antialiasing Mode to override application settings and Antialiasing Setting to 4x or 8x. Also set Transparency to Supersampling, Ambient Occlusion to Quality and Texture Filtering to High Quality. Now the graphics of your games will look a lot better at the cost of a severe drop in performance. Antialiasing is the worst offender here so should performance become an issue then just set that back to application controlled and you should be fine.
Optimizing Energy Management
This is only an issue on notebooks, so if you’re setting up a desktop PC then you might as well skip on to the next point on the list.
If you’re going to be playing games on your notebook then you probably have a gaming notebook that’s hooked up to the grid at all times. In that case it’s vital to change the default energy management settings, because they severely restrict performance and can even disable crucial system components. So I’ll guide you through the process of setting this up so that your laptop can perform at its optimal capacity.
Right click on the battery icon in your taskbar and select energy management, then open the drop-down menu and select high-performance. Change its settings and ignore the first few settings that pop up. Head into advanced setting instead, because that’s where things get interesting.
It’s vital to disable both Selective USB Interruption (USB Settings) and Link State Power Management (PCI Express). The rest you can setup however you please although I recommend to increase the hard disk shutdown timer to something a little more reasonable like 60 minutes. At its default setting it would cut off any hard disk activity 20 minutes in, which includes any downloads, like Steam games, you may have running while you’re away from your notebook.
Shut down unnecessary services
There are many system services that are automatically activated, but aren’t really needed for anything by a majority of users. If you’re a gamer or simply interested in getting the best performance possible out of your system, then you’ll want to disable as many such services as possible for the best boot times and lowest possible Windows footprint on your system resources.
These services can be accessed by typing services.msc in the search box and pressing enter. It’s possible to disable services in the list by right clicking on the intended service, opening the properties window and setting the service to disabled.
- Bluetooth Support Service. Only required if you have any bluetooth devices, such as a smartphone, communicating with your PC, utterly useless in any other situation.
- Distributed Link Tracking Client. This service keeps files and folders hosted on other PCs but linked to on your PC up-to-date. Only useful if you use such network shortcuts, which means you’ll probably just want to disable it.
- Parental Controls. If you have no need to control the activity of children on your system (e.g.: you don’t have any) then you should disable this service.
- Remote Access/Remote Desktop services. These are only useful if you intend to have your PC active at home and connect to it from someplace else. If not then they’re a security risk and best disabled.
- Remote Registry. A huge security risk and not something anyone is likely to every use so disable this straight away!
- Tablet PC Input Service. This is used to connect tablet input devices to your system, which is something only designers use. Required if you have a tablet, useless otherwise.
- Windows Media Center services. These services are only useful if you use Windows Media Center, which is highly unlikely, especially if you’re a gamer.
- Windows Media Player Network Sharing. This is only useful if you want to share media you’re watching in Windows Media Player over the network. Of course no one actually does this and Windows Media Player sucks, so you might as well disable this.
- Windows Search. This is a service that indexes the files on your computer for faster searching. It’s still possible to use search with this service disabled, it just takes – a lot – longer. The key point to note here is that it is a major system hog and the search function is something that you’re liable to use only sparingly.
Turn off Windows Firewall
Windows Firewall is a nice touch if you don’t have an alternative software firewall installation or a hardware firewall in your router, but both cases are highly unlikely nowadays. Windows Firewall isn’t quite the most secure software firewall available, but it is one of the most annoying to get properly configured with its incessant warning the moment you try to go online in any game. Disabling this is only a good idea if you have some other form of firewall to protect your system, because it does leave your internet ports wide open.
If you have a hardware firewall in your router or some other software firewall then you should disable Windows Firewall by going to the Control Panel and into System and Security. The Windows Firewall option leads you to a panel which allows you to disable the service. This will improve system boot times and your multiplayer gaming experience.
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