How to tweak your WindowsXP gaming machine!

[aerobahn]

sure there is. but do you boot off of a raid array?

[stapletonk]

I just boot off a 60gb hdd. IT does system check the next screen scans ide devices. then it says no array is defined. press f8 to fast track or esc to continue. I belive my motherboard supports ata133 raid.

[aerobahn]

Well Do you use SATA? or is it IDE?

If its IDE disable anything RAID in your bios. There also should be an option for booting on raid, if there is you should be abe to switch it to IDE. report back

[Xavius]

Just a question, since I have little computer knowledge I was wondering if setting these would, in the long run, hurt your computer in any way?

[tnt118]

Re: raid device

Originally posted by stapletonk
my motherboard supports a raid drive and always checks during startup, it takes about 10 -15 sec. is there a way to disable that, besides buying a new motherboard?

What's the motherboard? And did you put the system together yourself? I'm running an Asus A7N8X Deluxe which supports serial ATA and RAID. There was a jumper on the motherboard itself that needed changed to disable checking for those devices. Saved me about 10 seconds on bootup.

[aerobahn]

Originally posted by Xavius
Just a question, since I have little computer knowledge I was wondering if setting these would, in the long run, hurt your computer in any way?

no

[Lord Clodelroth]

Ok, I did a whole bunch of the things; basically everything. I figured I'd run the benchmark to see if changing all that would improve my score. When I loaded it, the background flickers red, then turns a light sand-color, and where the text is, it has reddish boxes. I changed everything back the way it was. Same thing happened. I re-installed benchmark. Same thing.

Help.

[Lord Clodelroth]

Can someone please help me? Whenever I try to run a 3D application now the colors are all messed up. Please, FFXI comes out tomorrow; don't do this to me!!

[jzhang]

well since u didn't post anything regarding ur system info... i'm just gonna make obvious suggestions...

- check ur video cable, make sure it's fully connected
- drivers... if u just updated... use older ones... just keep rolling back ur drivers until ur at the very first driver that supports ur card if none of them work
- reset bios to default settings
- reinstall windows

still got that problem? might be faulty video card or monitor... post more info if u need more help

[Lord Clodelroth]

This has nothing to do with hardware; my computer has been running fine for a long time now; and the problem first started when I used these tweaking methods.

I'm sure reinstalling Windows would fix it, but I don't have the CD at the moment, and I thought that perhaps someone(more specifically the creator of this topic) would be able to help fix it. I'm not an expert on Windows and I have no idea what could have effected the coloring of 3D applications.

[SSJChrono]

"AGP aperture size"
Please note that the AGP aperture is merely address space, not actual physical memory in use. Although it is very common to hear people recommending that the AGP aperture size should be half the size of system memory, that is wrong!
The best thing to do is keep it half your Video cards on board memory. I reccomend anywhere from 64 to 128. My card has 128mb so my aperture size is 64.

"WAR" (what aero recommends)
any 128 mb card = 64
any 64mb card = 32
any 32 mb card= 64 only if you have 512mb of ram otherwise 32.

why?

[Vairu]

thanks for all the tweaks ,i'm going to do some of them tonight while the servers are down. I'd also like to know what "Agp Arpeture Size" does. Could you please explain? Thanks

[Vairu]

crap, i did all of these tweaks(for XP home) on my laptop, and now my like "special function(fn) keys" won't work, like the shortcuts for volume, brightness, etc.
I thought it was that Human Interface Device service so i re-enabled it and it won't start the service now , i'm going to do system restore i guess, getting rid of just indexing and turning on l2-cache is good enough for me

[Kyoujin]

For the NFTS tweaks the data is entered as decimal, right? I'm petrified of screwing my registry so I'm not taking any guesses =P

[Xavious]

the only thing this guy did is regurgitate alot of stuff from blkvipers site... and he didn't even do it well at that.

the guy having video problems... you're probably best off reformatting your HD and reinstalling XP.