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Introduction
I've made a tweakguide with tweaks and tips that gave my system a huge performance boost in games and the possibility to play the latest games (the F.E.A.R demo for example) with ease.
This isn't a guide for total noobs. You have to know how to use regedit, taskmanager, etc. You also need to know how to use a keyboard and a mouse.
This guide is far from finished. Some tweaks may not be very clear to everyone, but I'll improve the explanations in a later update. Some tweaks can have a negative impact on your system, because it's faster than mine. Please read the conclusion for more information.
All of these tweaks are tested on Windows XP Home and Professional with SP1 and SP2 and are working perfectly fine.
These tweaks will drastically improve performance at the cost of functionality and good looks in Windows XP.
Functionality?! You won't be able to access certain parts of Windows XP because the needed services will be disabled. That's why you have to do some things before disabling them:
Go to Software (trough Control Panel) and click the add/remove Windows components button (not sure if that's the right name). It's the third button. Now remove any stuff you don't need (MSN Explorer, etc). This is needed because you won't be able to access this section anymore when you're finished.
Good looks?! Don't act like a little baby and remove those stupid XP, Style XP and Windowblinds themes. They use 4-12MB of your memory. This may not sound much if you have 2GB of memory, but these programs can drastically decrease performance.
These are all tweaks I used to get the most out of my old system. The tweaks are working fine on my system, but it's possible that you won't get a huge boost. This could be caused because of hardware problems (not enough power or cooling), out-of-date drivers, viruses or spyware. You of course need to keep your system clean by using programs like Ad-Aware, CCleaner and Registry Mechanic. It also needs to be optimized. You have to defrag your harddrive once or twice a month and search trough your Program files and WINDOWS folders monthly to remove any files you don't need.
I'm not responsible for damaged hardware (almost impossible) or systems that don't boot-up anymore (also almost impossible).
If you're having any problems, ask and I'll help.
Why tweak? What's the point of having a FX57 that's running at 60% of its power because your system is unoptimized? Why pay that much money for a computer that you can't even use? If you can't get 100% out of your system, you don't deserve it. To get 100% out of your system you have to sacrifice time.
When does a tweak work? After applying a tweak you most of the time have to restart your system. Now you have to have about two or three games on your computer to test the difference in performance again and again. You enable the tweak and test all three games. Now remember the FPS results and if the game was stuttering or not. Disable the tweak, restart and do the same thing again. You have to restart about 15 times until you're sure if the tweak has a positive or negative effect. You have to do this with every tweak you find.
Every tweak counts. Even if you get a 0.5 FPS increase in a game. This would mean that if you find 10 of those small tweaks you'll get a 5 FPS increase. Amazing!
Useful utilities
Ad-Aware
http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-SE-Personal-Edition/3000-8022_4-10399602.html
CCleaner
http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner.html
Registry Mechanic
http://www.download.com/Registry-Mechanic/3000-2094_4-10349249.html
Diskeeper
http://www.download.com/Diskeeper/3000-2094_4-10335605.html
RivaTuner
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=163
Cacheman
http://www.download.com/Cacheman/3000-2248_4-10216523.html
NeoCleaner
My results
Halo before tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/AF, lowest settings): 15-30 FPS
Halo after tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/8xAF, highest settings): 20-40 FPS
Call of Duty before tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/AF, lowest settings): 20-70 FPS
Call of Duty after tweaking (1024x768x32, 4xAA/8xAF, highest settings): 30-100 FPS
Far Cry before tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/AF, lowest settings): 5-20 FPS
Far Cry after tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/AF, lowest settings): 30-60 FPS
Doom 3 before tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/AF, highest settings): 2-40 FPS
Doom 3 after tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/AF, highest settings): 5-60 FPS
As you can see there's a huge difference in performance. These aren't the only games that have gotten a boost, but I'm not going to post everything.
Lets start tweaking
Have you removed all the useless XP software like I explained earlier (Functionality?!)? Have you disabled those themes (Good looks?!)?
We're first going to start with the easy, basic stuff.
Updating
Updating is one of the most important things to do. Go to Windows Update and install all critical updates. Not because you need a secure system, but because those updates will improve the loading times and responsiveness of XP. I noticed it myself. I had to look at the XP loading bar 13 times when booting, but after installing some updates now I only need to look at it once.
Now you have to update your motherboard (chipset), videocard and souncard drivers. I think you know how to do that. After you've updated everything, you shouldn't get many artifacts and crashes anymore when running games. Go to Start, Run, type dxdiag and click OK. Go to the display tab and do the Direct3D tests. The 7 interfaces test is the most important one. If the cube is spinning too fast or not shown at all you should change your videocard drivers.
Videocard settings and overclocking
Go to the videocard control panel and put all of those nice settings to Application controlled. If you use Coolbits, there's a render frames ahead setting (default 3). Some games run better with this setting at 0 (Doom 3) and some work better at 3 (Far Cry). You should test this yourself.
You can use Coolbits or RivaTuner to overclock your videocard. They both work perfectly fine. You can overclock the core and memory speeds of your videocard. First set the memory speed as high as you can. Now you're supposed to get a message saying that you can't overclock this far. Keep lowering the setting until you're allowed to keep it at that setting. When you're having artifacts in games it most of the time is because the core speed is to high. Start making jumps of 10MHz and after every jump you have to play a game (I use Halo and Doom 3) for 30 minutes. If you don't get any artifacts make another jump. When you're getting artifacts start lowering the core speed with 1-2MHz until they're gone. Now you've found the limits of your videocard.
Go to the BIOS of your computer (restart and then F1/F8/F10/Del) and change your aperture size to 128MB. There's no real FPS difference. This setting shouldn't be set too low or too high. Sideband addressing should always be enabled and fast writes disabled.
XP tweaking
This is the most important part of this guide. Tweaking XP will give you the biggest boost in performance. We'll disable useless processes and services and change some settings that will make sure XP and other programs won't interfere when you're playing games. Your CPU and memory have to be 100% 'focused' on the game and nothing else running in the background. The goal is to have only crucial XP (8 processes) and videocard (1 process) processes in the taskmanager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and nothing else.
The first thing to do is remove all the useless programs that have processes starting up with XP. You shouldn't have any icons in your system tray. Removed and closed them? Now we have to disable the things that are left. Go to Start, Run, type msconfig and click OK. Now go to the tab on the right. Here you can see the programs that start up with XP. Disable everything you don't need. I only have one nVidia process starting up. First disable everything and restart. If XP doesn't boot, go into safe mode and start enabling some of the programs. After repeating that a few times you'll know which ones are needed to boot and which ones aren't. You can use Hijack This to see if there's any hidden software booting up with XP. You can remove them with that program.
Now you should have a lot less crap in your taskmanager. Now XP should work a little faster than normal and you should have a lower CPU (5-8%) and memory (80-100MB) usage.
Now we're going to disable XP services. Disabling some of these services will result in having less sections of XP to access, but they won't be needed anymore. For example, DHCP Client is needed for some people to go online, Windows Management Instrumentation to use Install Shield and Network Connections to see your internet connection in the Internet Connections folder.
Go to Start, Run, type services.msc and click OK. Now you see all the services and if they're loaded or not. You can see if a service boots with XP by right-clicking it and going to Properties. You can disable services by going to the properties of the service and selecting disabled in the drop-down box. First disable the services of your antivirus and any other non-XP programs and see if they're still functioning. If they aren't working try putting their services to manual. Use this guide to disable the XP services. With that guide I managed to lower the starting services to 11 and then I started testing those 11 by myself. Now I'm running games with just 5 services loaded. You can't do this in just 15 minutes. It took me 3 months to get my system running with 5 (6 when online) services enabled. You have to keep restarting your computer to see if you can keep a certain service disabled.
Use CCleaner, Registry Mechanic and Ad-Aware to keep your system clean and optimized.
After doing all of this you should have a CPU usage of 0-1% and a memory usage of 65-80MB when doing nothing.
Now there shouldn't be any background programs left that can decrease gaming performance.
Now it's time to change some XP settings so it focuses everything on the running game.
There are a lot of people saying that some registry tweaks don't work at all and that you shouldn't use them. For example the always unload dll's and superfetch tweaks. I decided to test these two tweaks and I noticed that when enabling the unload all dll's tweak the memory does get free faster after using a lot of programs. Lets say you go surf the internet, talk on MSN, install software and use Words. Now your memory is full of crap, but if this tweak is enabled everything gets unloaded and the game works just as fast as after a fresh reboot. The superfetch tweak was a little more complicated. There wasn't any framerate difference when enabling this tweak, but I did notice that everything was going a lot smoother. The biggest shock I got was when I started comparing the loading times of the tests in 3DMark03. The loading times were cut in half and there were no stutters in the tests at all. I immediately broke my 3DMark03 record. While testing both these tweaks I had to restart my system more than 8 times, enabling and disabling the tweaks and seeing if there was a difference.
All tweaks I'm posting here are tested by me and gave me a boost in performance.
Always unload dll's: Go to Start, Run, type regedit and click OK. Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr
entVersion\Explorer. Now make a new sub-key called AlwaysUnloadDLL with a value of 1.
Superfetch: Go to Start, Run, type regedit and click OK. Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro
l\Session Manager\Memory Management\Prefetcher. You'll see EnablePrefetcher on 3. Now you have to make a new DWORD called EnableSuperfetch with a value of 1.
Never use a program to add registry tweaks (except the Unload all dll's tweak), because you'll get nothing but problems.
Foreground application priority: Removed, because this setting constantly can keep your CPU usage at 100%.
Virtual memory: Everybody always says that you have to put this setting to 1.5x your memory and stuff like that. You have to test this for yourself. Just run a very memory intensive game and see how much memory is used. There are games that will have problems if you don't have enough virtual memory. Put it on any partition you want. People say it matters, but I didn't notice any difference.
XP visuals: Right click My Computer or go to System trough Control Panel. Click on the Advanced tab and go to performance. Select best performance. You can enable some of the XP visuals if you need them. You also should disable the background and screensaver.
Systemcache: Go to the same section as above (visual effects) and then go to the Advanced tab. Processor usage should be set to Programs and memory usage to Systemcache. This will provide smoother gameplay and faster loading times in more advanced games like Doom 3, UT2004 and Far Cry.
Game tweaking
XP is supposed to be working extremely fast now. The games themselves also have to be tweaked.
You always have to patch the games you play to the latest versions for the best stability.
Normally you always double-click the icon of a game and you start playing, but that isn't the right thing to do if you want the best performance. You should first close explorer.exe and any other unneeded programs like msnmsgr.exe, wmplayer.exe, etc. After doing that you should go see if unneeded services are loaded and close them. Now you have to open up taskmanager and start up the game trough File --> Run --> Browse and you also need to change the priority of the game to High by right-clicking the process and selecting High priority.
All of this takes a lot of time to do, so here's how to do it in a few seconds.
Start notepad and type this:
taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
net stop "Services voor cryptografie"
net stop "DHCP Client"
net stop "Service voor het rapporteren van fouten"
start /wait /high C:\Games\FarCry\Bin32\FarCry.exe
start C:\Windows\explorer.exe
This file will close explorer.exe, close those 3 services, run Far Cry at High priority and start explorer.exe again after you've closed Far Cry. You have to add your own processes and services. You have to save that file as Far Cry.bat in the Far Cry folder and make a shortcut to it on your desktop. The directory of the FarCry.exe file can't have any spaces:
WRONG: C:\My Games\FarCry\Bin32\FarCry.exe
RIGHT: C:\MyGames\FarCry\Bin32\FarCry.exe
You have to install your games in a directory where there aren't any spaces, because if you don't the .bat file won't work. At first it's quite difficult to get this working, but you'll learn it very fast (I can help). This method won't work if the Windows Management Instrumentation service is disabled.
This one only closes explorer.exe and reloads it after you close the game:
taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
start /wait /high C:\Games\FarCry\Bin32\FarCry.exe
start C:\Windows\explorer.exe
Using this method speeds up loading times drastically and removes any stutters in games. If your mouse stutters when playing a game on High priority, set it to abovenormal (start /wait /abovenormal C:\...). Don't use realtime, because your keyboard and mouse could get disabled.
Game specific tweaks: Normally if you're experiencing low FPS or stutters you go to the graphics menu and lower some settings, but it's best if you first start with the advanced and hidden settings. Go to TweakGuides for explanations on how to edit the config files of certain games. First start with settings which have no impact on the image quality, like the precaching settings (Doom 3, UT2004). You have to analyze what's causing the low framerates. For Geforce 4 and FX cards dynamic lighting (Doom 3) is the biggest framerate-eater. Dynamic shadows also are tough for those cards, but a lot less than lighting. Geforce 6 and 7 cards don't have any problems with dynamic lighting. So when you have a Geforce 4 or FX card you should first disable dynamic lighting (if possible) by using the in-game menu or changing it in the config file.
Direct3D vs. OpenGL: Do OpenGL games work better on nVidia videocards? Yes, a little better. Do OpenGL games work like crap on ATi videocards? No, their drivers are just less optimized for OpenGL games. nVidia users should switch to OpenGL mode (if supported) when playing a game, because it will decrease the loading times and increase the framerates. This is possible in Far Cry and UT2004.
OpenGL RivaTuner tweak: I noticed that when I change the OpenGL version string override setting to 1.0 I get a more responsive system in Doom 3. There also are less stutters when shooting someone.
Install as many games as possible?! If you install some games their setup will have small updates for DirectX. The F.E.A.R demo has an DX update which improves performance when dynamic shading is used. Other games with crucial updates: UT2004, Deus Ex 2, Doom 3 and Legacy of Kain Defiance. You can't find these updates on the Windows Update website so it's important that you install games that have such updates.
Conclusion
This guide is far from finished (50%), but I'm posting this part of the guide now so you can start tweaking while I'm searching for all the other tweaks I've used in the past (can't remember every tweak I used in the last 5 years). This guide will be updated daily. You'll be able to see if it's updated when the version number below changes. If you see that something isn't right please tell me so I can fix it. Also ask me for help if a tweak doesn't work. If you have any other tweaks that you want me to put in the tweakguide please post and I'll test them.
Good luck!
I've made a tweakguide with tweaks and tips that gave my system a huge performance boost in games and the possibility to play the latest games (the F.E.A.R demo for example) with ease.
This isn't a guide for total noobs. You have to know how to use regedit, taskmanager, etc. You also need to know how to use a keyboard and a mouse.
This guide is far from finished. Some tweaks may not be very clear to everyone, but I'll improve the explanations in a later update. Some tweaks can have a negative impact on your system, because it's faster than mine. Please read the conclusion for more information.
All of these tweaks are tested on Windows XP Home and Professional with SP1 and SP2 and are working perfectly fine.
These tweaks will drastically improve performance at the cost of functionality and good looks in Windows XP.
Functionality?! You won't be able to access certain parts of Windows XP because the needed services will be disabled. That's why you have to do some things before disabling them:
Go to Software (trough Control Panel) and click the add/remove Windows components button (not sure if that's the right name). It's the third button. Now remove any stuff you don't need (MSN Explorer, etc). This is needed because you won't be able to access this section anymore when you're finished.
Good looks?! Don't act like a little baby and remove those stupid XP, Style XP and Windowblinds themes. They use 4-12MB of your memory. This may not sound much if you have 2GB of memory, but these programs can drastically decrease performance.
These are all tweaks I used to get the most out of my old system. The tweaks are working fine on my system, but it's possible that you won't get a huge boost. This could be caused because of hardware problems (not enough power or cooling), out-of-date drivers, viruses or spyware. You of course need to keep your system clean by using programs like Ad-Aware, CCleaner and Registry Mechanic. It also needs to be optimized. You have to defrag your harddrive once or twice a month and search trough your Program files and WINDOWS folders monthly to remove any files you don't need.
I'm not responsible for damaged hardware (almost impossible) or systems that don't boot-up anymore (also almost impossible).
If you're having any problems, ask and I'll help.
Why tweak? What's the point of having a FX57 that's running at 60% of its power because your system is unoptimized? Why pay that much money for a computer that you can't even use? If you can't get 100% out of your system, you don't deserve it. To get 100% out of your system you have to sacrifice time.
When does a tweak work? After applying a tweak you most of the time have to restart your system. Now you have to have about two or three games on your computer to test the difference in performance again and again. You enable the tweak and test all three games. Now remember the FPS results and if the game was stuttering or not. Disable the tweak, restart and do the same thing again. You have to restart about 15 times until you're sure if the tweak has a positive or negative effect. You have to do this with every tweak you find.
Every tweak counts. Even if you get a 0.5 FPS increase in a game. This would mean that if you find 10 of those small tweaks you'll get a 5 FPS increase. Amazing!
Useful utilities
Ad-Aware
http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-SE-Personal-Edition/3000-8022_4-10399602.html
CCleaner
http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner.html
Registry Mechanic
http://www.download.com/Registry-Mechanic/3000-2094_4-10349249.html
Diskeeper
http://www.download.com/Diskeeper/3000-2094_4-10335605.html
RivaTuner
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=163
Cacheman
http://www.download.com/Cacheman/3000-2248_4-10216523.html
NeoCleaner
My results
Halo before tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/AF, lowest settings): 15-30 FPS
Halo after tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/8xAF, highest settings): 20-40 FPS
Call of Duty before tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/AF, lowest settings): 20-70 FPS
Call of Duty after tweaking (1024x768x32, 4xAA/8xAF, highest settings): 30-100 FPS
Far Cry before tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/AF, lowest settings): 5-20 FPS
Far Cry after tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/AF, lowest settings): 30-60 FPS
Doom 3 before tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/AF, highest settings): 2-40 FPS
Doom 3 after tweaking (1024x768x32, noAA/AF, highest settings): 5-60 FPS
As you can see there's a huge difference in performance. These aren't the only games that have gotten a boost, but I'm not going to post everything.
Lets start tweaking
Have you removed all the useless XP software like I explained earlier (Functionality?!)? Have you disabled those themes (Good looks?!)?
We're first going to start with the easy, basic stuff.
Updating
Updating is one of the most important things to do. Go to Windows Update and install all critical updates. Not because you need a secure system, but because those updates will improve the loading times and responsiveness of XP. I noticed it myself. I had to look at the XP loading bar 13 times when booting, but after installing some updates now I only need to look at it once.
Now you have to update your motherboard (chipset), videocard and souncard drivers. I think you know how to do that. After you've updated everything, you shouldn't get many artifacts and crashes anymore when running games. Go to Start, Run, type dxdiag and click OK. Go to the display tab and do the Direct3D tests. The 7 interfaces test is the most important one. If the cube is spinning too fast or not shown at all you should change your videocard drivers.
Videocard settings and overclocking
Go to the videocard control panel and put all of those nice settings to Application controlled. If you use Coolbits, there's a render frames ahead setting (default 3). Some games run better with this setting at 0 (Doom 3) and some work better at 3 (Far Cry). You should test this yourself.
You can use Coolbits or RivaTuner to overclock your videocard. They both work perfectly fine. You can overclock the core and memory speeds of your videocard. First set the memory speed as high as you can. Now you're supposed to get a message saying that you can't overclock this far. Keep lowering the setting until you're allowed to keep it at that setting. When you're having artifacts in games it most of the time is because the core speed is to high. Start making jumps of 10MHz and after every jump you have to play a game (I use Halo and Doom 3) for 30 minutes. If you don't get any artifacts make another jump. When you're getting artifacts start lowering the core speed with 1-2MHz until they're gone. Now you've found the limits of your videocard.
Go to the BIOS of your computer (restart and then F1/F8/F10/Del) and change your aperture size to 128MB. There's no real FPS difference. This setting shouldn't be set too low or too high. Sideband addressing should always be enabled and fast writes disabled.
XP tweaking
This is the most important part of this guide. Tweaking XP will give you the biggest boost in performance. We'll disable useless processes and services and change some settings that will make sure XP and other programs won't interfere when you're playing games. Your CPU and memory have to be 100% 'focused' on the game and nothing else running in the background. The goal is to have only crucial XP (8 processes) and videocard (1 process) processes in the taskmanager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and nothing else.
The first thing to do is remove all the useless programs that have processes starting up with XP. You shouldn't have any icons in your system tray. Removed and closed them? Now we have to disable the things that are left. Go to Start, Run, type msconfig and click OK. Now go to the tab on the right. Here you can see the programs that start up with XP. Disable everything you don't need. I only have one nVidia process starting up. First disable everything and restart. If XP doesn't boot, go into safe mode and start enabling some of the programs. After repeating that a few times you'll know which ones are needed to boot and which ones aren't. You can use Hijack This to see if there's any hidden software booting up with XP. You can remove them with that program.
Now you should have a lot less crap in your taskmanager. Now XP should work a little faster than normal and you should have a lower CPU (5-8%) and memory (80-100MB) usage.
Now we're going to disable XP services. Disabling some of these services will result in having less sections of XP to access, but they won't be needed anymore. For example, DHCP Client is needed for some people to go online, Windows Management Instrumentation to use Install Shield and Network Connections to see your internet connection in the Internet Connections folder.
Go to Start, Run, type services.msc and click OK. Now you see all the services and if they're loaded or not. You can see if a service boots with XP by right-clicking it and going to Properties. You can disable services by going to the properties of the service and selecting disabled in the drop-down box. First disable the services of your antivirus and any other non-XP programs and see if they're still functioning. If they aren't working try putting their services to manual. Use this guide to disable the XP services. With that guide I managed to lower the starting services to 11 and then I started testing those 11 by myself. Now I'm running games with just 5 services loaded. You can't do this in just 15 minutes. It took me 3 months to get my system running with 5 (6 when online) services enabled. You have to keep restarting your computer to see if you can keep a certain service disabled.
Use CCleaner, Registry Mechanic and Ad-Aware to keep your system clean and optimized.
After doing all of this you should have a CPU usage of 0-1% and a memory usage of 65-80MB when doing nothing.
Now there shouldn't be any background programs left that can decrease gaming performance.
Now it's time to change some XP settings so it focuses everything on the running game.
There are a lot of people saying that some registry tweaks don't work at all and that you shouldn't use them. For example the always unload dll's and superfetch tweaks. I decided to test these two tweaks and I noticed that when enabling the unload all dll's tweak the memory does get free faster after using a lot of programs. Lets say you go surf the internet, talk on MSN, install software and use Words. Now your memory is full of crap, but if this tweak is enabled everything gets unloaded and the game works just as fast as after a fresh reboot. The superfetch tweak was a little more complicated. There wasn't any framerate difference when enabling this tweak, but I did notice that everything was going a lot smoother. The biggest shock I got was when I started comparing the loading times of the tests in 3DMark03. The loading times were cut in half and there were no stutters in the tests at all. I immediately broke my 3DMark03 record. While testing both these tweaks I had to restart my system more than 8 times, enabling and disabling the tweaks and seeing if there was a difference.
All tweaks I'm posting here are tested by me and gave me a boost in performance.
Always unload dll's: Go to Start, Run, type regedit and click OK. Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr
entVersion\Explorer. Now make a new sub-key called AlwaysUnloadDLL with a value of 1.
Superfetch: Go to Start, Run, type regedit and click OK. Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro
l\Session Manager\Memory Management\Prefetcher. You'll see EnablePrefetcher on 3. Now you have to make a new DWORD called EnableSuperfetch with a value of 1.
Never use a program to add registry tweaks (except the Unload all dll's tweak), because you'll get nothing but problems.
Foreground application priority: Removed, because this setting constantly can keep your CPU usage at 100%.
Virtual memory: Everybody always says that you have to put this setting to 1.5x your memory and stuff like that. You have to test this for yourself. Just run a very memory intensive game and see how much memory is used. There are games that will have problems if you don't have enough virtual memory. Put it on any partition you want. People say it matters, but I didn't notice any difference.
XP visuals: Right click My Computer or go to System trough Control Panel. Click on the Advanced tab and go to performance. Select best performance. You can enable some of the XP visuals if you need them. You also should disable the background and screensaver.
Systemcache: Go to the same section as above (visual effects) and then go to the Advanced tab. Processor usage should be set to Programs and memory usage to Systemcache. This will provide smoother gameplay and faster loading times in more advanced games like Doom 3, UT2004 and Far Cry.
Game tweaking
XP is supposed to be working extremely fast now. The games themselves also have to be tweaked.
You always have to patch the games you play to the latest versions for the best stability.
Normally you always double-click the icon of a game and you start playing, but that isn't the right thing to do if you want the best performance. You should first close explorer.exe and any other unneeded programs like msnmsgr.exe, wmplayer.exe, etc. After doing that you should go see if unneeded services are loaded and close them. Now you have to open up taskmanager and start up the game trough File --> Run --> Browse and you also need to change the priority of the game to High by right-clicking the process and selecting High priority.
All of this takes a lot of time to do, so here's how to do it in a few seconds.
Start notepad and type this:
taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
net stop "Services voor cryptografie"
net stop "DHCP Client"
net stop "Service voor het rapporteren van fouten"
start /wait /high C:\Games\FarCry\Bin32\FarCry.exe
start C:\Windows\explorer.exe
This file will close explorer.exe, close those 3 services, run Far Cry at High priority and start explorer.exe again after you've closed Far Cry. You have to add your own processes and services. You have to save that file as Far Cry.bat in the Far Cry folder and make a shortcut to it on your desktop. The directory of the FarCry.exe file can't have any spaces:
WRONG: C:\My Games\FarCry\Bin32\FarCry.exe
RIGHT: C:\MyGames\FarCry\Bin32\FarCry.exe
You have to install your games in a directory where there aren't any spaces, because if you don't the .bat file won't work. At first it's quite difficult to get this working, but you'll learn it very fast (I can help). This method won't work if the Windows Management Instrumentation service is disabled.
This one only closes explorer.exe and reloads it after you close the game:
taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
start /wait /high C:\Games\FarCry\Bin32\FarCry.exe
start C:\Windows\explorer.exe
Using this method speeds up loading times drastically and removes any stutters in games. If your mouse stutters when playing a game on High priority, set it to abovenormal (start /wait /abovenormal C:\...). Don't use realtime, because your keyboard and mouse could get disabled.
Game specific tweaks: Normally if you're experiencing low FPS or stutters you go to the graphics menu and lower some settings, but it's best if you first start with the advanced and hidden settings. Go to TweakGuides for explanations on how to edit the config files of certain games. First start with settings which have no impact on the image quality, like the precaching settings (Doom 3, UT2004). You have to analyze what's causing the low framerates. For Geforce 4 and FX cards dynamic lighting (Doom 3) is the biggest framerate-eater. Dynamic shadows also are tough for those cards, but a lot less than lighting. Geforce 6 and 7 cards don't have any problems with dynamic lighting. So when you have a Geforce 4 or FX card you should first disable dynamic lighting (if possible) by using the in-game menu or changing it in the config file.
Direct3D vs. OpenGL: Do OpenGL games work better on nVidia videocards? Yes, a little better. Do OpenGL games work like crap on ATi videocards? No, their drivers are just less optimized for OpenGL games. nVidia users should switch to OpenGL mode (if supported) when playing a game, because it will decrease the loading times and increase the framerates. This is possible in Far Cry and UT2004.
OpenGL RivaTuner tweak: I noticed that when I change the OpenGL version string override setting to 1.0 I get a more responsive system in Doom 3. There also are less stutters when shooting someone.
Install as many games as possible?! If you install some games their setup will have small updates for DirectX. The F.E.A.R demo has an DX update which improves performance when dynamic shading is used. Other games with crucial updates: UT2004, Deus Ex 2, Doom 3 and Legacy of Kain Defiance. You can't find these updates on the Windows Update website so it's important that you install games that have such updates.
Conclusion
This guide is far from finished (50%), but I'm posting this part of the guide now so you can start tweaking while I'm searching for all the other tweaks I've used in the past (can't remember every tweak I used in the last 5 years). This guide will be updated daily. You'll be able to see if it's updated when the version number below changes. If you see that something isn't right please tell me so I can fix it. Also ask me for help if a tweak doesn't work. If you have any other tweaks that you want me to put in the tweakguide please post and I'll test them.
Good luck!
sorry man.