Although Windows 7 is a great operating system with tons of great features and application, when it comes to gaming, its performance is still lagging behind Windows XP. One of the reasons is that most of the current games are not designed for Windows 7 which utilizes the new DirectX 10 technology. Another reason is that Windows 7 has a lot of activities running in the background that interferes with the gaming resources.
Here are 5 Tips and Tricks to Increase Game Performance in Windows 7
1) Upgrade your PC Hardware
This includes the RAM, CPU and graphics card. For gaming in Windows 7, make sure that you own a dual core CPU, 2 GB RAM and a DirectX 10 compliant graphics card.
2) Turn off hibernation
If you don’t use the hibernation feature, you can disable it and recover around a gigabyte of hard disk space. To do this,
- Open Command Prompt.
- Type powercfg.exe /hibernate off or powercfg -h off
- To enable it again go to command prompt and type powercfg.exe /hibernate on or powercfg -h on
3) Disable the Sidebar
While this is a great eye-candy, it takes up a lot of resources. To disable the sidebar,
Click on Start ---> Control Panel ---> Programs ---> Under Programs and Features--> Click on Turn Windows Features on or off ---> Now uncheck Windows Gadget platform ---> Restart the System
4) Move swap file to another drive/partition
Swap file is a temporary file used to store data for future use. If you have another drive, you can speed up Windows 7 a bit by moving the swap file to that drive. Or if you are using only one drive, you can set up a partition to store your swap file.
- Click on Start -> Control Panel -> System and Security -> System
- Choose Advanced system settings from the top left hands side
- Make sure that the Advanced tab is selected
- In the Performance section click Settings
- Click on the Advanced tab
- In the Virtual Memory section click Change
- Uncheck “Automatically manage paging file sizes for all drives”
- Click on the partition you want to use as a swap partition, select Custom Size, and set the new sizes of your swap file.
- Click on the primary partition, check “No paging file” and click Set. This is to prevent Windows 7 from placing a swap file on your primary partition.
- Restart the computer
5) Use Ready Boost
Windows ReadyBoost allows you to add a non-volatile USB 2.0 flash memory drive to improve memory performance on systems that have less than 1GB of memory. This is is a great feature to use if you have a computer that is difficult to upgrade the random access memory (RAM) like a the new and very popular MINI computers on the market.
Windows 7 ReadyBoost is very easy to use. Once you add a USB flash drive to your computer Windows 7 checks to see if the performance is fast enough to work with Windows ReadyBoost. If so, you are asked if you would like to use this drive to speed up Windows 7 system performance. You can choose to use all of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) drive or part of it.
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