Am I weird for doing this before I game...

N

n370zed

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 21, 2012
Messages
450
I turn off everything that i dont need running in the background. Just trying to get the best possible experience. I mainly Play Overwatch Comp so I dont need any random disconnects/crash and stuff lol.
 
Yeah, I do the same thing normally. Don't want something bugging out right in the middle of a fight.
 
Isn't unusual at all. I turn my cheapy ceramic heater fan down to as low as it will go to cut-out the background noise. I play with headphones on so when the heater is on at normal speed I can hear it.
 
I turn the aircon off in the car if I need to get somewhere fast... true story!! :cool:
 
I just do it through msconfig and it's done. It's just habit to do it on a clean install of Windows. If something new gets installed I'll check it again. I rarely need to turn stuff off in the system tray when gaming.
 
I do it, but only because some of those typical background programs like to call home to check for updates, start pulling updates, also there's a small chance of getting popped out from the game because of a message popup. So I guess mainly network and loss prevention :p
Performance wise the difference is very subtle if you have a sane config.
 
Back in the XP days, a friend of mine wrote a program that would do that for you when you launched a game. You could specify which things it would shut down based on which application you ran. It could also start other applications before starting the one you were going to run. That was great for stuff like starting TS before running a MMO, or launching TrackIR software before starting a flight sim. It was great.

I do that through the task manager now.
 
I don't have anything running at startup that interferes with games. Anything I open in between startup and gaming gets closed when I'm done anyways.
 
Ive been doing that for the laslt 10//15 years. Dont know if it helps much but guess it doesnt hurt.
 
I don't do it anymore, but back in the Windows 95-XP days that was a pretty common thing to have to do. Especially based on your hardware and how much nonsense ended up starting up with your PC.
These days I don't have (or need) anything external that starts up with my PC, although lots of programs have snuck their stuff into your services rather than just shoving an exe into the startup folder or launch list.
 
I restart my computer before playing any game. This means that if I'm playing game A and want to play game B, I need to stop game A and then restart the computer before starting game B. Not sure if it's OCD but I notice performance issues if I don't have a clean boot before firing up a game.
 
My system must be stable all the time, not just when I launch a game. I never let anything run that isn't totally essential to my needs and doesn't interfere with ANYTHING, at all. ever.

One time of some issue and it is gone if it can't be updated or patched. I have found that there is a lot of crap that comes with new hardware that just flat-out isn't needed.

Applications should be launched when needed and shutdown when not. Multi-tasking applications, of course, don't count. Having some auto update crap running in background is totally a no-go.
 
For multiplayer games, I turn everything off that might be using any bandwidth. I'll pause all downloads, turn off all streaming services, etc... Old habit from spending 10+ years with 1.5Mbps DSL. I have "real" internet service now, but I still turn off anything using bandwidth.
 
I haven't done anything like that in years.

Back in the DOS days it was necessary to change autoexec.bat and config.sys for each game to make sure the right drivers were running and properly distributed between high and low mem, I'd set up batch files to rewrite them so I didn't have to edit them manually each time.

In the win 95-early xp era I would shut down anything I could including any AV and a few windows services.

More recently I don't even bother to shut down my plethora of browser tabs. I've always got at least an extra gb or two of memory available and nothing I run uses more than a blip of cpu cycles when sitting idle, I did have an issue with windows update a few months ago where it was maxing out one of my cores and causing problems but that was a one off glitch. IMO if you're having any issues these days then it's time for an upgrade or to rethink what you have running all the time, I realize I might feel differently if I played competitively though.
 
Depends on what it is. I've been playing Mad Max for the last week or two and the vast majority of missions are "go here, kill these guys, collect this.". When I'm just doing things like that I mute the sound and watch Netflix or something. If a game requires my full attention and is immersive. It's likely I'll lock in and shut everything else out. INSIDE and OXENFREE come to mind. Dark Souls. FPS like Wolfenstein or STALKER. Pretty much anything not sandboxie bullshit time wasters.
 
I don't bother with stuff like that anymore. I used to be real big on that, back in the win 98 days it was mandatory in my opinion. However as time has gone on and system power has grown, I've just not bothered. I find now that my system has more power than it needs to everything is fine, and also that the OS itself does lots in the background so disabling 5 user tasks would be rather little difference.
 
Still a habit from the old days for me, Back when you needed every ounce of power just to get a decent framerate in new games
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top