Tips For Maxing Gaming Performance

[The Spartan (Returns)]

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

[The Spartan (Returns)]

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

[Gregoshi]

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

[Beirut]

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?

[hoom]

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.