Tips For Maxing Gaming Performance

Anybody got tips that doesnt involve buying anything? Here's a good one:
Maximum PC By EvilBox

also does taking alot of space in your drive hinder performance? (even after defragmenting)

Interesting stuff Spartan. I'll have to play with some of the suggestions. Thanks! :thumbsup:

My HD partition knowledge is weak, but doesn't it cut load times of you partition a large (and full) HD and put games in different parts?

I've even been thinking of getting a separate HD just for one big flightsim I play and keeping the game, all patches, and skins in there.

Any advantages to this over partitioning?

Generally you need to have some percentage spare space for the drive to decompress files/stick additions on.
Some testing has actually shown that defragging can slow access compared to a moderately fragmented disk (think random access).

Partitioning is much less important with later versions of XP.
NTFS file system has less issues with big partitions than fat32 + early on XP had issues if you gave it a boot partition bigger than 10GB (I think, may have been 4GB)

Primarily I keep a 10GB partition for Windows & swap file but install games on a different physical disk.
Other programs/data go on either other disk or the other partition but never in the windows partition.
This way I can reinstall windows at will without loosing important data.