One of the major complaints about Windows Vista when it first came out was how unfriendly it seemed to be to gamers. While it did have DirectX 10 for improved graphical performance, there were plenty of issues regarding performance slowdowns and software incompatibility with the new OS. This was especially a letdown after Windows XP proved itself to be such a stable and reliable operating system for gamers.
Many times, if a game would start at all, either the screen or the player controls, or both at the same time would freeze up, effectively killing your gaming experience. While Windows 7 has resolved many of these issues, those stuck with Vista might feel a little unfairly left behind. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to fix game freezes and other performance problems on Windows Vista.
Check Game Requirements
In its initial release, Windows Vista was a sluggish beast, weighed down by all sorts of inefficient apps and services few people really needed. This was reflected in the system requirements posted for video games sold since the operating system’s release. Game developers often require 512 MB to 1 GB of additional RAM when running their products on systems with Windows Vista. If you feel that your PC is right on the minimum requirements to run a game, then you can do a few things to help optimize your system for a smooth gaming experience.
Use System Rating To Check Performance
The first thing you need to do is to run System Rating, a built-in tool in Windows Vista that analyzes your PC’s performance. All you need to do is right-click on My Computer, select Properties, and click on your Windows Experience Rating. This will give you a score that is broken down into several performance components such as RAM, graphics capability, and processor speed. If you see that a component of your PC is at or below the minimum requirement to play a game, then a hardware upgrade might be necessary.
Disable Startup Items To Increase Speed
There are other ways to speed up your system without any expense. You can disable some startup items, which are the programs that are opened whenever you start up Vista. You don’t need all of these programs, and all of them take up a little memory and a little processing power even if they’re just running in the background. All you have to do is press the start button, and type “msconfig” in the search dialog. This will open up a window of options for customizing Vista. Select the “Startup” tab and uncheck any programs that you don’t need. This should help eliminate any game freezes caused by a lack of system resources.
Defragment For Smoother Gaming
Another thing you can do is to defragment your hard drive. Modern video games are made up of gigabytes of files, most of which need to be accessed within milliseconds of each other in order to produce a smooth gaming experience. Sometimes, games freeze because they are unable to access the next needed file in time. This could be because the data on your hard drive is scattered all over the place. Defragmenting the disk rearranges all this data, putting associated files next to each other in order to improve file access times.
March 10th, 2011 at 2:39 pm
This is really good info!
Assuming Vista is up-to-date and you have updated all your drivers for the best hardware you can get, about the only thing I could think of would be to add an automatic defragger (it would be a real mood-kill to have to wait for a manual defrag to complete before you can play your favorite game!)
I recommend Diskeeper for all defrag concerns as it will quickly and automatically defrag your drives without robbing your system resources, and it also prevents fragmentation so your system will be ready to game on your schedule!
June 30th, 2011 at 2:36 pm
You can get more info on fragmentation and how to deal with it at the Defragmentation Information Center:
http://www.diskeeper.com/defrag/defragmentation-center/