Stripped down windows...

[fuzzynavel]

Is it possible to have a version of windows that makes a very small memory footprint and actually have it run on a PC....I.e I want to optimise my windows installation for games, so that I have as many free system resources as possible!

 

[casper114]

Don't install any of the extra features when you install windows...games, ect. and don't install any other software except for games

 

[fuzzynavel]

Is that as good as it gets?? hardly worth it....

I was hoping for something like safe mode but with just the drivers that I needed or even an MS-DOS-like environment....windows hogs too many resources!

 

[Phoenix86]

Windows already does the memory side of things with paging and preemptive multitasking.

That being said people like nlite for this task. Not sure it yields much of anything as far as performance is concerned with. XP isn't W9x.

edit: If you are concerned about memory, make sure you system has enough RAM to run all active programs.

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: fuzzynavel
Is that as good as it gets?? hardly worth it....

I was hoping for something like safe mode but with just the drivers that I needed or even an MS-DOS-like environment....windows hogs too many resources!

What basis do you have for saying that? Honestly, you could spend days trying to eek out a handful of FPSes in your games, but it's not really worth it.

Make sure your hardware is adequate and your drivers are up-to-date.

 

[BlueWeasel]

LiteXP??

 

[fuzzynavel]

Originally posted by: MrChad

Originally posted by: fuzzynavel
Is that as good as it gets?? hardly worth it....

I was hoping for something like safe mode but with just the drivers that I needed or even an MS-DOS-like environment....windows hogs too many resources!

What basis do you have for saying that? Honestly, you could spend days trying to eek out a handful of FPSes in your games, but it's not really worth it.

Make sure your hardware is adequate and your drivers are up-to-date.

Brand new install with new hardware about 1 week ago.....all latest drivers freshly downloaded last week with the install......

Does my hardware look adequate?? mid range buty performs nicely in BF2....medium/high settings at 1280x960.....monitor only does max of 1280x1024

I';m happy....just want more.....

 

[Johnnie]

my current Win XP Pro ISO is only 143MB 🙂

using nLite

 

[Nothinman]

http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/07/running-windows-with-no-services.html

 

[Epimetheus64]

Windows 3.0 only needs 1 MB of RAM iirc. Isn't there a version of XP (i think it's called embedded) that has a low footprint?

 

[Loki726]

Originally posted by: fuzzynavel

Originally posted by: MrChad

Originally posted by: fuzzynavel
Is that as good as it gets?? hardly worth it....

I was hoping for something like safe mode but with just the drivers that I needed or even an MS-DOS-like environment....windows hogs too many resources!

What basis do you have for saying that? Honestly, you could spend days trying to eek out a handful of FPSes in your games, but it's not really worth it.

Make sure your hardware is adequate and your drivers are up-to-date.

Brand new install with new hardware about 1 week ago.....all latest drivers freshly downloaded last week with the install......

Does my hardware look adequate?? mid range buty performs nicely in BF2....medium/high settings at 1280x960.....monitor only does max of 1280x1024

I';m happy....just want more.....

If you want more performance, go to work, earn an extra $500 and buy a 7800gtx. It will get you a hell of alot more performance than any tweaking you can do.

 

[m3rcury]

Go with nLite. I use it, and my XP cd is also ~130MB. After a fresh install (and not counting the page file), my c drive uses a little under 400mbs. It also supports Server 2003, and windows xp x64. I tried WinLite and other paid stuff before that, but they all had problems. nLite works perfectly for me.