Skyrim on an eight year old rig

[carlos3lance]

This is probably amateur stuff, but maybe try TuneUp Utilities. I used to have a weaker rig than that up till last december, with a 1.3GHz single core, socket A amd and an Nvidia Geforce FX 5500 256Mb card. Never ran something like Skyrim on it, but TU freed up a lot of resources and corrected a lot of registry errors, to keep me running. I'm guessing you probably already did all this manually, but it might help keep his registry in the same shape as when you finished tweaking for a long time.

 

It has configurable turbo mode, for brutal sessions:

 

postpone maintenance tasks, turns off sync and support for mobile devices, cameras, that sort of stuff. Turns off special visual effects, ensures optimal performance regardless of power consumption, turns off background functions like network media library,quick search index creation, error reporting and support for virtual machines. Also turns off rarely used services, special encryption services and network communication services. All this Only as long as turbo mode is active.

 

Best thing yet, it has a Live Optimization app that runs in the background that increases response rate actively, by giving background processes that use to many resources a lower priority, so that your currently running programs aren't starved.

 

The rest is registry optimization and defragmentation under maintenance tasks, and a utility to display the nature( necessary but not crucial, optional) of programs and processes on startup and an option to deactivate the optionals (and others, if it deems it safe)completely on startup, and activate only on application demand. All the little things should add up in taking off the strain while Skyrim is running.

[alt3rn1ty]

Farlo you dont need Skyrim Performance Plus with Vanilla Reduced Textures anymore .. I did the same trick in my files from v6 onwards. Although I reckon you probably noticed having read how much detail this topic goes into :)

 

Gamebooster was getting quite good at one time, for older OS's anyway. Just before it went commercial and links to the last known good free version (sans adver/malware) started getting pruned off the net.

Win 7 has addressed a lot of what it could do (ie not even having background services setup in the first instance on a home machine which were only appropriate for a commercial environment machine .. Which can be called into service on demand for anyone wanting there machine to have more professional needs anyway)

 

There's very little needs culling from a win 7 home setup, and nothing which msconfig (google it, and be careful ;)) cant put a stop to permanently .. without the need for running yet another utility to do the same job, itself taking resources.

 

Tune up utilities, never tried, but I guess its more of the same with either a subscription/browser toolbar plugin or advertisements angle.

 

And proprietary machine software .. A bit more difficult to cull especially if it maintains a hidden partition for rescue purposes - But I find 90% of it just duplicates what you can do with windows anyway. These days I tend to get a machine, and if not provided also a win 7 install disk, then reformat and repartition the HD's how I want it (sometimes with a dual boot MBR for a linux partition), and always right click and move my documents to a different partition from the system partition, before storing anything there. Worst happens, reformat the system partition, re-install OS, documents are still there on the non system partition and you just move the documents location to where you have them stored already) .. hmm, going OT :)

 

Anyway, I think you have most of what you can do squared away, but I would like to mention one tool you may not have heard of, and controversially this may seem like an additional service (which I have presented as unnecessary in the case of Gamebooster etc)

 

This one is an extension of a service you dont want to stop, so it does not actually add another service ...

 

Prio

 

There are other pretenders to the throne but this one is very efficient, does no more than it claims, and is actually (wait for it) free. No angles, nothing else installed, reliable and recognised by microsoft security essentials as a trusted change to windows task manager (plus other anti-malware I have had previously installed, and MalwareBytes Antimalware which I have installed but in-active to launch occasional checks to see if MSSE has been doing a good job, so far it has).

MRT will also leave it alone (windows own once a blue moon scanner which comes down the line with windows updates and periodically scans your setup - Type mrt in your start search box and run it, something here a lot of people will not know is you can run it in Full Scan mode (which it never does for the purpose of windows update scans, that just does a quick scan) .. ehm, going OT again ..

 

It has a few additions to task manager which are very useful, I love the TCP/IP tab for having a nosy at what connections any given process has with the outside world .. But the main thing for your purpose is the ability to save exe priorities (and that sticks for the next time you boot your machine).

 

Dont go daft with it and prevent win 7 from completely getting any priority to do essential background processes while you game on, but just raise skyrim for example 1 step higher in priority.

 

Its not remarkable, but it does make a slight difference on machines such as your endeavor to optimise every little bit that helps.

I have been using it for circa 6 years now.

 

Edit: Oh yeah, before gaming .. disconnect your lan / wifi too :)

[alt3rn1ty]

So much for my recommend, Prio has had a recent update which does not seem to install correctly, the previous version I luckily still have prio_win32_200_2751 works a treat on win 7, however the current prio_win32_200_2918 is a no show in Task Manager.

 

I submitted a report ticket so watch out for updates.

[Farlo]

Thanks for the advice guys, but I've been busy lately and I just found out my brother's birthday present is a new rig, so it looks like I won't be able to see this through. Let's hope some other poor soul can find a use for it.

[alt3rn1ty]

Thanks for the advice guys' date=' but I've been busy lately and I just found out my brother's birthday present is a new rig, so it looks like I won't be able to see this through. Let's hope some other poor soul can find a use for it.

My bold - And for anyone who may have been interested in Prio before the latest version bugged out on win 7, just received a message from the authors to test out the latest .. Its working properly again.

 

Download at the bottom here ( ignore the version 1.99 in the description, the download will give you version 200 2960 at time of posting )

 

Read all about it here and ref my previous posts on the subject ^^ :)