Free Gaming Mode Maximizes PC Performance

One way to optimize windows for playing games is to quickly get a more efficient setup with a game booster.

Computers are excellent for playing games. But sometimes you can experience game lags, and this could increase your chances of dying just when you are about to conquer the world.

You could spend hours, days, weeks finding the lightest software, limiting applications from actively running from the tray, disabling the right services, and reading lengthy guides on windows optimization. All just to get the best game playing computer imaginable!

Gamers know that game play is only as efficient as their slowest part. If you have a fast Internet connection, a fast modern computer, extra memory, special graphics cards ... but still have a bunch of programs or services auto starting and running in the background, then possibly you will get game lags, poor performance, slow clicking and mouse response, and so on.

Windows also likes to start many unnecessary programs and services on the off chance you might need to send a fax. For some, this just offends our sense of minimalism.

Some people don't like to mess around with windows services, however, for fear of future problems or because they have many computing needs in their non-gamer life. Or maybe they just get squeamish thinking about control panel settings.

Smart PC Utilities feels your pain and has the best open source freeware solution -- Vista Services Optimizer 1.2 (VSO). Don't let the name fool you because it also works on Windows 7 and it has an excellent Game Boosting Mode.

Gamers unite! Click here for a video on the program. The installation is user-friendly, and it has a portable version.

VSO provides you with a "Gaming Mode feature that could improve your system performance while playing the latest PC games by temporary turning off unnecessary Windows services resulting in a smoother gaming experience" (Features).

You simply press "Switch to Gaming Mode" and it temporarily disables a long list of windows services. In it's next version (version 1.3, yet to be released), it will intensify processor performance instead of relying only on optimizing services.

You can simply close the application after entering gaming mode since it will remember whether Gaming Mode is on or off the next time you run VSO, or you can click "Hide" to keep VSO running in the tray.

Then you can go kill bad guys in virtual peace, and to the max of your computer's ability. And after you finish, you simply hit "Switch to Normal Mode" and it restarts all the services it disabled.

In my testing, on my fairly optimized Vista machine, it reduced the overall physical memory usage of services by about 1%. So even if you love to optimize and have your PC nicely tweaked, it still finds more stuff that doesn't need to run while you wage war.

You don't need "Windows Update," "Help and Support," the "Fax Service," "Windows Time," "Media Center" stuff, "Parental Controls" or other junk slowing you down.

Maybe you don't want those excess services slowing down your jamming session either.

It's an excellent utility for those of you who don't trust disabling services or don't have the patience for finding all of the hidden features to manually optimize windows.

For some users who don't normally optimize their systems, it might have a greater impact. Grab the System Explorer and see what it does. If you are not happy, you could always uninstall it or just use it for optimizing services.

The Gaming Mode screen also nicely provides you with 8 other links to windows features and additional tweaks to help with performance, but these are not temporary changes for the most part and may decrease your windows experience.

It's an extremely simple app for gamers. Boost your performance and play. I found its effects rather marginal, but I still like using it ... and I'm keeping it. I like saying "No" to windows services while I play games or listen to music. It's my computer after all.

Gizmo originally reviewed VSO more generally here: Free Utility Speeds Up Vista.

Vista Services Optimizer (VSO), Version 1.2 (Home | Download): 2.9 MB download, 4.8 MB folder size after portable installation, works with Windows Vista-7 (both 32/64 bit). Latest release: September 30, 2009. Scanned clean and free of malware.

Related Products:

• System Explorer & CleanMem: You can achieve better results with VSO by using System Explorer to temporarily end unnecessary processes from running constantly, and by using CleanMem to free up more memory and cache (it works from the task scheduler and so doesn't use memory actively itself).
   
• Ultimate Windows Tweaker (UWT): I highly recommend the UWT without hesitation, as reviewed here: Best Free Vista Tweaks. It has many helpful system performance tweaks, but you might have to do a Google search to understand its options.
   
• Fusion Utility for Desktops: AMD also has a game optimizer utility that lists many exciting features in its FAQs section, but the download is large (23.8 MB) and it's just for computers with an AMD processor. Thanks to an anonymous poster for bringing this to our attention. I haven't tested it as of yet, but it looks like an excellent find. Supports XP/Vista/7 (32/64 bit), only AMD CPUs, and requires administrator rights.
   

For the sake of comparison, IOBit has a Game Booster that works very similar to VSO and provides similar results. However, it has a couple extra features worth mentioning, such as displaying any programs running in the background and prompting you with the option to temporarily close them; as well as cleaning RAM and intensifying processor performance.

In my testing, on my fairly optimized Vista machine, it cleared away 50-70 MB of RAM the first time and then between 20-25 MB in its later attempts. After you switch to gaming mode, you can also minimize it to the tray. When it's minimized, it's own memory use reduces significantly. However, it doesn't have a portable version.

I only mention Game Booster since the article was originally written for it and it helps for comparison. The only other advantage is that IOBit's Game Booster supports windows 2000/XP (Softpedia has the newest version if you are in this situation).

Note: I don't recommend Game Booster or any IOBit product. We don't link to IOBit product websites per site policy: IOBit's main website has cautionary site ratings from WOT, and it's listed in the respected hpHosts' host file restrictions. Please respect our site policy in the comments; it's not the place to debate IOBit politics.

Related Tweaking Guides and Articles:

• How to Make Vista Run Faster
• See other System Utilities and Cleaning/Tuning Software