Can you increase 3DMark06 scores by tweaking XP?

[coolpurplefan]

I gotta learn how to tweak XP but I wonder if it's really worth it. I score about 3005 in 3DMark06.

 

[StopSign]

What's the point of tweaking your system for 3DMark? You should be tweaking it for the games you actually play, even though there isn't a whole lot to tweak to start with.

 

[Arkaign]

Agree with StopSign. Your score won't go up very much, maybe 1-2% if that, even with extreme tweaking, unless your system is just a mess.

What DOES make difference in real-world performance is making sure your memory is as freed-up as possible. BF2 is a good example, you need every meg you can throw at it, so if you have a bunch of crap autoloading @ boot, and taking extra ram (and cpu cycles), then your BF2 performance will decline. This problem eases a bit when you have more ram, but with less than 2gb, you need all you can get.

 

[Nothinman]

I gotta learn how to tweak XP

No, you really don't. MS knows more about their OS than you likely ever will. Some basic tweaks are possible but most tweak sites list utter BS that will only end up causing at worst problems and at best a placebo effect.

 

[montag451]

Best tweaks -
START
RUN
msconfig
startup tab -
Untick all non essential proggies.

That speeds up most systems more than some other BS

 

[sanzen07]

Yeah, I went down the tweaking road a couple years ago with XP, which involved turning off many services, visual effects, and anything else various sites told me I didn't need. Needless to say, my performance really didn't improve at all and I ended up needing some of that stuff later. In short, the only thing that will speed up your computer significantly in 3DMark will be buying new hardware, though I personally would care more about real game performance than 3DMark scores.

 

[Nothinman]

That speeds up most systems more than some other BS

Not unless you've got some really bad crap in there, sure it'll help bootup time a bit but that's about it.

 

[montag451]

"Not unless you've got some really bad crap in there"
Obviously if you have bad crap on your system it won't have such an effect - but also, you might notice that more items are starting up that you don't know what the hell they are - like for example, uikgddfhlg.exe.

"sure it'll help bootup time a bit but that's about it."
No its not about it. Think about it - if a proggie isn't starting up, then its not using memory or other resources. That will make a difference if you have several proggies that you don't need booting up with windows.

 

[Nothinman]

Obviously if you have bad crap on your system it won't have such an effect - but also, you might notice that more items are starting up that you don't know what the hell they are - like for example, uikgddfhlg.exe.

And if you don't know what they are how are you supposed to make an decision about whether they're important or not?

No its not about it. Think about it - if a proggie isn't starting up, then its not using memory or other resources. That will make a difference if you have several proggies that you don't need booting up with windows.

Memory is the only really important resource and unless that app is constantly running in the background it'll be forced out of memory whenever necessary, that may cause an extra second or two during something else loading but that's about it.

 

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Obviously if you have bad crap on your system it won't have such an effect - but also, you might notice that more items are starting up that you don't know what the hell they are - like for example, uikgddfhlg.exe.

And if you don't know what they are how are you supposed to make an decision about whether they're important or not?

No its not about it. Think about it - if a proggie isn't starting up, then its not using memory or other resources. That will make a difference if you have several proggies that you don't need booting up with windows.

Memory is the only really important resource and unless that app is constantly running in the background it'll be forced out of memory whenever necessary, that may cause an extra second or two during something else loading but that's about it.

I think you're pretty right on target here, though I would like to add one caveat :

As far as Start Menu\Startup, and the msconfig 'startup options' are concerned, as long as it's not a device driver applet (for scanner/printer/etc), or a critical program (POS software for a register PC, etc, Antivirus/Antispyware program), then you can safely disable everything there for a moderate performance boost. At worst, you've freed up some ram and saved some system resources, and at best, you'll see a giant performance leap.

It's part of my tune-up process for customers at my shop, and often it makes a truly amazing difference before-and-after for the typical system that comes in (Celeron 2ghz, 256mb DDR, 845g video, 40g hdd, etc). You take a system that had 5-7 crapware w/icons in the taskbar starting up, and you defrag it, clean it of spyware/adware/viruses, disable all non-critical startup items, and voila, the system is halfway usable again. Sometimes a system that took 45-60 seconds from the desktop appearing until becoming responsive would then take 5-10 seconds for the same result. Or IE taking 15 seconds to opening down to 2-3 seconds.

Tuning/Optimizing/Cleaning XP can have a dramatic impact, depending on the amount of junk/adware/crapware/malware/spyware installed.