Performance boost

[Marcus Caelius]

I don't know if this is old hat to everybody here, but I managed to significantly improve performance on my ante-diluvian machine using the piece of software called FSAutostart

Available here: http://www.kensalter.com/fsautostart/

took me about 20 minutes to configure it and now even full size battles with RTR run very smoothly

[The Spartan (Returns)]

cool. will check it out.


also consider looking at this.
really, really helps: here

[Monarch]

Hey mate,

This looked really interesting to me, so I quickly downloaded it. I especially like the option where it automatically will set the priority, usually I have to ctrlaltdel as I'm launching BI to set it to high. So thats nifty.

I'm just wondering if you could offer some support, I see there are options to disable security centre, windows updates, etc. Will this just disable whilst I'm running my application, or forever on my pc? I'm too lazy to go and manually get updates, so I want auto updates, but if it only disables them whilst my app is running then I'll be happy to turn them off.

So ye, just some help please. And thanks for the link, thiss will especially help to prevent to complete annhilation of my pc that Oblivion will wreak when I get it for my bday in a few weeks =D

[x-dANGEr]

Is there any link I can DL it from..

I searched in that link with no use..

[Monarch]

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/S...utoStart.shtml

[x-dANGEr]

Thanks for the FAST reply

[Marcus Caelius]

Sorry monarch, I only found this while surfing Silent Hunter 3 forums. I figured it should work for RTW - and it did!

[Marcus Caelius]

Reading your post again, I can answer some of your questions for you.

All the programs you select to *Stop* will be stopped when you run RTW. However, nothing that this program does is permanent (or so it says) - the next time you start up your computer, all the programs will start up again as they are now.

All the programs you select to *Stop and Restart* will be stopped before RTW loads (it takes about 15 seconds) and will restart automatically when you exit RTW (it takes another 15 seconds)

In my case, for example, most of my mcafee software i have chosen to stop once starting RTW - which it does, but when I exit RTW, MAcafee restarts and functions perfectly normally

OK?

[Monarch]

Thanks for the info! =D

[sbroadbent]

Regarding the Total War Command Center suggestions, there are some good suggestions, and also some unnecessary things depending on your setup and your priorties. Alot of which follows is advanced user type of stuff, but can really help prevent performance from dropping.

The first thing to do is to have a decent router. With that you no longer require the Windows firewall, and if you do any sort of multiplayer gaming, things become so much simpler when the windows firewall is not running. One of the common methods of computers being infected by spyware/adware is simply having an unprotected computer on the internet. You don't even need to be doing anything, but a good router can prevent virtually all of these. I can't even remember when I last had any sort of adware/spyware or even any virus infections and there have been months where I've not had any AV or spyware scanning tools on my computer at all. When I did suspect something could be on my machine, I was sadly disappointed that it was something other than a virus or spyware

Uninstalling unwanted programs as is Removing startup items are good ideas as it frees up space, and limits what actually needs to be running. I was at an all weekend gaming party and we had a computer that bogged down horribly while playing anything. Startup was slow, and these few things helped quite a bit. Rebooting the computer was horrible as it took a few minutes for windows to load (yes, I said minutes), and even if it is only a minute or two, it seems like an eternity when everyone is waiting and you're sitting there trying to get into the game.

Here is another place to shutdown services: Black Viper's Services Configurations. It gives you all the windows xp services that can be loaded at startup and gives you a few different "profiles" depending on how the computer is being used. The list tells you whether something is Vital, it gives you the Default XP config, as well as a few configurations such as safe (mostly removes unnecessary items ensuring that you have maximum functionality), Internet Gateway, as well as a Gaming profile. Best of all, they explain many of the different services so that you can decide whether you need it or not. If something happens that an error pops up because one of the services you disabled needs to be run, it's easy to go back into services.msc and re-enable the appropriate services.

Defragmentation is a good maintenance step, particularly if you do alot of downloading and deleting. If you use any filesharing programs, the best way to limit fragmentation is to create a separate partition to segregate your downloads from the rest of the hard drive.

For a good performance boost you'll want to create a small 1-4GB partition at the start of your hard drive. The reason for creating it at the start of the hard drive is because you get faster read/write performance. Within windows you'll want to direct your page/swap file to this partition (the reason for 1-4 GB is because it is generally recommended that your swap be 2.5 times the size of your RAM in your computer, so having 1GB or ram means your swap should be 2.5GB). You won't be able to use the entire partition for this as windows needs atleast 5MB free. If you don't want to reinstall windows, the easiest way to do this is to have a second hard drive to place the swap partition, otherwise use a program like partition magic. A useful program for managing your hard drives is the Computer Management utility which can be found in the Control Panel under Administrative tools. This is a screen shot of my hard drives:

http://www.sbroadbent.com/mtw/cm.jpg

I have 4 primary partitions (Swap, install, documents and dump) which serve different purposes. Swap is obvious. Install is where I install all programs, documents is where all my data (music, pdfs, resumes, etc) sits, while dump is a temporary storage location for shareaza downloads.

If I had a second physical hard drive in my system I would likely dedicate the second to my documents (as I'm currently storing about 50GB of cd iso's on the dump partition). I also have 2 external hard drives; a 300GB drive that has every episode of Star Trek ever produced and will eventually have all 10 Star Trek movies. The other is a 160GB drive that currently has over 100GB of videos and tv shows.

I used to have the swap partition at the end of the drive but the problem is that is also the slowest area. When I moved the partition from the end to the start I noticed a huge boost in performance. In general, partitioning is a good idea by devoting one partition to windows and any installed programs, and saving everything else on other partitions. If your windows ever gets corrupted, and you need to reformat/reinstall it's incredibly simple to just format the install partition without losing any of your saved data. Programs do like to store profile information in the Documents and Settings area and so you'll have to manually back these up. It sucks horribly to lose all your email (as had happened to myself) from the last year because you missed that one Thunderbird folder.

[ByzantineKnight]

Im kinda left behind, what do you do?

[Marcus Caelius]

if you are talking about the FSAutostart program, you download the program and follow the instuctions on the website linked above. In short you produce a profile for each game you want to play. You decide which of the services and programs normally running on your machine you want to shut down in order to free-up processing power to run your game, and you then point the profile at the .exe of the game. You can then run the game by clicking start in FSAutostart rather than using the desktop shortcut, or alternatively you can make a new desktop shortcut pointing to the FSAutostart profile (apparently - i haven't tried it)

I have actually run into a minor snag trying to make FSAutostart run BI, but RTW works just fine. I'm trying to figure out why that would be the case

[ByzantineKnight]

if you are talking about the FSAutostart program, you download the program and follow the instuctions on the website linked above. In short you produce a profile for each game you want to play. You decide which of the services and programs normally running on your machine you want to shut down in order to free-up processing power to run your game, and you then point the profile at the .exe of the game. You can then run the game by clicking start in FSAutostart rather than using the desktop shortcut, or alternatively you can make a new desktop shortcut pointing to the FSAutostart profile (apparently - i haven't tried it)

I have actually run into a minor snag trying to make FSAutostart run BI, but RTW works just fine. I'm trying to figure out why that would be the case

Ok Thanks

[ATE]

That's the best damn tip I've read this year!

I'm playing M2TW on an NC8000 with a radeon 9600-64mb/512mb/1.7Ghz, and FSAutostart made my day, the game is almost running smoothly now.

It has some problems shutting down a few services, but besides from that... wow!

Hail to the mighty Marcus Caelius!

// ATE

[naut]

Holy thread resurrection.

Anyway, might have a peek.

[ATE]

Holy thread resurrection.

Anyway, might have a peek.

Just don't you whine about users not using the search function

[naut]

Woops, wrong thread.