Increasing Performance on Windows XP ( and FSX)

[mgculver]

Hi. Thought I would post this information as it's a good list of performance tweaks that will boost performance in Windows XP.

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1590

Windows XP runs a lot of stuff both as services and background programs. Many of these can be "turned off" for a significant performance gain. The simplest thing to do is go into control panel ->System ->advanced->Performance and set XP for performance.

A WORD OF CAUTION!!! Some services are required for other programs so just turn them off by stopping the service. They should restart with a reboot. Any changes you make to the registry are permenant, so BE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP OF YOUR REGISTRY!!!! In addition to these tweaks, you should close down everything you can that appears in your system tray. Especially antivirus programs, spam stoppers, etc.

I was able to increase my display overall from a medium low to medium high or high, and also wound up getting rid of the stutter and jerkiness problems for a smooth flight.

Fun Flying,

Mike C

[McFlysky]

What tweaks did you use?

[mgculver]

17,18, 21,22,23,24,28,32,42,44,46

22,23,24 pretty much go together. On thing to be aware of; if you do not allocate enough space on your hard drive for paging, your system will hang. I have 4.5GB allocated as both min and max. I have found 4.5 to be adequate for FS9 and assume it will be OK for FSX. I may have to increase it.

I also run SATA drives in RAID 0 configuration.

One final thing to do is defrag the pagefile:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...ageDefrag.mspx

Here is a link on Windows services - many can be disabled:

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/kba...rformance.html

Thx

[Brushstrokes]

A simple program called AUTOSTART which I downloaded and used for FS9 and now use for FSX. Easy to setup and use. It can be found in the FS9 file section under utilities. Im surprised more people on here have not heard of, or use this program. What this program does is automatically shut down all the useless services that run in the background. You would be surprised how much goes on in your computer behind the scenes!

[mgculver]

Hi Jack. Do you know exactly where the program is? I was looking around the forum and could not find it. There are a lot of people trying to step up the performance of their PC to get FSX to work. If memory serves me, sysinternals used to have such a program as well.

If you could post the program you refer to, it would be appreciated by many.

Personally, I think FSX has had a little bit of a bad rap mainly due to other memory hoggers. A good example is while people turn off or exit their virus programs, the service still runs in the background - simply exiting or closing some programs does not remove the service(if it uses one). Another killer is the fact that XP does not release DLL's completely when programs are closed. In some cases it keeps them around for faster loading.

Thx

Mike C

[DutchCoolHand]

I have seen the suggestion to turn off your virus scanner seversal times. 2 things I wonder about; 1) is my system stil safe? Should {I use my firewall to block any internet traffic so that I can safely turn off my virus scanner.But what if I want to fly online with others? 2) how do I turn off my Mcafee virus scanner, if I start killing processes related to Mcafee in the task manager they restart automatically.

Thanks

[W2DR]

Here's one place to get it: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/S...utoStart.shtml

Doug

[mgculver]

Is my system safe?

If you are not on a network, or are directly accessing the internet, then yes.

If you are on a network (through a server), it will depend on how the network is configured with respect to your virus scanner, malware solution and how you connect to the internet.

If you block ports 80 (http),25 (smtp), 26(some isp's use 26 for smtp) and any other open ports, then you should be protected from any internet interference and can comfortably turn off your virus scanner and malware solution. Just be sure to turn them back on. If you are going to block your ports, you might as well diconnect the line by pulling the plug.

If you are going to be accessing the internet, or you are on an unsecure network, I would not recommend turning off virus scanners or malware solutions.

I am not sure how McAfee works, but you should be able to shut down the related service(s) then close down the processes.

Regardless, whenever I shutdown my virus and malware programs to play FS, I always run a full scan (using both the anitvirus program and malware program) when I reboot. Over the past four or five years, I have not had a problem (maybe I'm just lucky).

Hope this helps.

[kc10]

>If you block ports 80 (http),25 (smtp), 26(some isp's use 26 for smtp) and any other open ports, then you should be protected from any internet interference and can comfortably turn off your virus scanner and malware solution. Just be sure to turn them back on. If you are going to block your ports, you might as well diconnect the line by pulling the plug.<

Instead of unplugging it, why not just disable the adapter in Device Manager. Wouldn't that work?

[mgculver]

Same Diff.