| Category | Keywords | Advice |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware | Graphics, Performance, Frame Rates | The following three tips have the most direct effect on increasing speed in games (in the order listed) 1. Reduce screen resolution (best way to improve speed) 2. Reduce the bit resolution from 32 to 16 (less effective on the latest cards) 3. Reduce texture quality. 4. Turn off anti-aliasing (has a big impact on speed) 5. Make sure any fan on your graphics card is clean and working. Can cause instability and crashes. 6. If your graphics card supports it, turn on AGP Fast Write in the BIOS (sometimes listed as 1ms Read and Write). This can up the speed by 10%. 7. The aperture setting in the BIOS refers to how much main memory the graphics card can utilise. Half your system memory is usually a good idea. |
| Hardware | BIOS, Motherboard, PCI, bus | 1. The PCI latency timer. Set this to 64, or even 128, clock cycles so long as your system only has one or two PCI cards installed. On busier systems this is best left at 32 clock cycles. 2. PCI IDE BusMaster. This controls whether the 16-bit DOS driver is loaded. Set to "Enable" to reduce the boot times and speed real-mode programs live "Norton Ghost". 3. Offboard PCI/ISA IDE card. If you add a second IDE controller, the BIOS should recognise it automatically. But you can force the issue by telling it in which slot you have intalled it. |
| Software | DOS, MS-DOS, MS DOS | The command window in XP is not a DOS window. The best you can try to do, if you need to run a DOS program is to either boot with a DOS floppy, or try the Win95 compatibility mode (right-click then properties-compatibility). Win95 is much closer related to DOS and the program may well work. If the above fails you will need to get a DOS emulator. "DOSBox" emulator is available from "http://dosbox.sourceforge.net". This will allow your powerful Pentium/Athlon to look like an old 486. Running DOSBox couldn't be simpler. Run it from the command line by typing: dosbox <filespec>-fullscreen-<display type> <filespec> is the path and executable that you want to run. The folder containing the executable will be mounted as a virtual C drive. <display type> is normally vga, but you can also emulate hercules, cgaand tandy displays. |