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In the Forums... |
Posted: April 21th, 2001 Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen Preparation Before you even begin to tweak Black and White, I can’t stress enough how crucial it is to make sure the rest of your system is performing at its peak. You simply can’t overlook important things such as device drivers and useless monitoring programs that hamper overall system performance. The first thing you’ll want to do is check out whether any of your devices need a driver update. It’s very easy to forget a device driver update and often times slow performance and poor stability result. It only takes a few minutes to surf by the websites of manufacturers to see whether they have posted new drivers for your particular device. A driver can fix errors, add new features, or just speed things up and these factors all add up to a smoother gaming session. Now that you have the latest drivers for your hardware, you need to make sure that there aren’t any programs running in the background that aren’t needed. The first place you need to check is the Startup folder in your Start menu. After you have cleared unnecessary junk out of it, you can move onto “msconfig” if you’re running Win9x. Just click on Start, Run and type in “msconfig” without the quotes and press OK. A window should pop up with a bunch of tabs from you to choose from. Locate the tab called Startup and uncheck anything you know you don’t need. Windows 2000 users have to go through a little more trouble if they want to thoroughly clean their startup process. If you’re one of those users, you’ll need to do some Registry editing. From here on, any advice I give is strictly done on your own terms -- if anything goes weary, don’t blame me. Click Start, Run, type “regedit” without the quotes and press OK. Once inside, expand the folder called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, Microsoft, Windows, CurrentVersion, and Run. Inside Run, you should see keys for all programs that are loaded at startup or login. You can delete an undesired key entirely or you can just modify the path of the key so that it incorrectly points to the program. The second method is safer than total deletion because you can always enter Safe Mode and restore the key if Windows doesn’t startup properly or you want to add the key back. Once you’re all done with those high level tweaks, you can go onto lower level tweaks such as overclocking your processor and video card. Sometimes, fiddling with settings inside your BIOS can yield performance increases that you didn’t expect. If you feel inclined to attempt these tweaks, swing over to our Articles section and take a look. |
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