iiNfamous' Gaming Essentials

[microwolf96]

Just a quick list of things I would recommend people to use. This list consists of performance and security boosting programs and tweaks.

Anti-Virus Software

AVG Antivirus Award winning protection to meet your basic security needs.​

Summary/Personal Opinion: Great, free (or optional payed for more protection) Antivirus. Automatically removes viruses, is capable of scheduled scans so you don't have to manually start them. Used by over 110 million users!

avast! Antivirus
Summary/Personal Opinion: Free Antivirus (with optional choices to pay for better security). Works for the most part the same as AVG, minus a few features in the free version.

Performance Boosters

Game Booster
Summary/Personal Opinion: Great, free program used to disable unneeded services in Windows for better performance in your favorite games. Also has the option of defragmenting your game directories specifically.

CCleaner
Summary/Personal Opinion: Awesome program to help you rid of unneeded junk, free up hard disk space, and much much more. Also helps keep you secure!

Tweaks

Reduce your visual graphics to increase performance. Also affects your ingame performance.

Instructions:

1. Click the Start
   
   button.
2. Right click "Computer"
3. Click "Properties"
4. Click "Advanced system settings"
5. Under "Performance" click "Settings"
6. Check "Adjust for best performance"
7. Click Apply, then OK.
8. Right click an empty space of your desktop.
9. Click Properties (XP) or Personalize (Vista), "Screen Resolution" (7)
10. XP: Click "Settings" tab. Vista: click "Screen Resolution"
11. Change the resolution to 1024x768 on a classic CRT. 1280x1024 on a 4:3 LCD. 1280x720 on a 16:9 LCD. 1280x768 or 1280x800 on a 16:10 LCD. Click apply if needed and close the window.

Increase your page file size to increase your virtual memory (Virtual RAM, basically. Uses hard drive).

Instructions:

1. Starting from Advanced system settings, go back into "Performance" settings and click the "Advanced" tab.
2. Click the "Change" button.

You should see some information and options to change now.

1. Take a calculator and put the size of your hard drive disk in megabytes into the calculator. Divide that by 64 for hard drives below 250gb. Above, divide by 32.
2. The number that appears on your calculator should be placed in the "Maximum size (MB)" field.
3. Set the initial size to whatever is recommended (see bottom of virtual memory window).

Note: The size of your hard drive in Megabytes is the size in Gigabytes multiplied by 1024.

To finish this, click Set. Then, Ok. Click "Programs" in the field for adjusting how to allocate processor resources if not set already. Click apply if needed then click Ok. If prompted, restart your system.

Note: These tweaks also work on Windows XP and Vista. They have simular layouts. You should be able to figure it out if you can read labels. I wrote the tweaks based on my operating system, Windows 7.

Extra information: All programs listed are fully functional in all versions of Windows commonly used today, including Windows 2000.

Happy Gaming!
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[Simon]

im gonna use this on my old PC, might run CSS a bit then

 

[microwolf96]

Heheh. I'm working on making a smaller image of the start button. I'm in photoshop right now. The tweaks and game booster help a lot.

I'm gonna add another tweak to improve performance after I'm finished with this start button.

 

[mattM_-]

I would also post several links to different steam game FPS configs. Last night, I gave my buddy a copy of L4D2 and his FPS after the install was 5-10 FPS. After downloading a FPS config, setting some launch options, and enabling multi core rendering, he now runs in the high 50s @ 800x600.

 

[microwolf96]

I would also post several links to different steam game FPS configs. Last night, I gave my buddy a copy of L4D2 and his FPS after the install was 5-10 FPS. After downloading a FPS config, setting some launch options, and enabling multi core rendering, he now runs in the high 50s @ 800x600.

This isn't meant for specific games. It's just to give anyone who needs it a boost in their performance. It helps especially with older PCs.