windows xp Essential XP Gaming Software / Tips / Tweaks

[Richard Webster]

My XP gaming PC (32 bit) is more or less finished and it's lovely. I was wondering what essential software or tweaks to the system I should do, to get the best experience.

 

I've already got the following software:

• RTSS (for solid frame times/limits)
• RadeonPro (Vsync, AA, AF)
• TweakUI

 

Specs:

• CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 215

• GPU: ATI Radeon X1900 XTX

• RAM: 2GB DDR3 (single stick, which I might upgrade later to a dual channel 4GB kit)

 

I've done a couple of things to tweak performance but nothing major and just thought I'd ask folks in case I've not thought of something.

[ahuckphin]

I run my XP retro gaming machine with an OEM XP installation with no tweaks. 

[Bitter]

To get 4GB or more RAM working in 32bit XP you'll need to enable PAE via editing the boot.ini and adding /pae to the end of the 'operating system' section line and then add some files and reference them in the boot.ini as well.

https://msfn.org/board/topic/176356-simple-xp-32bit-64gb-ram-true-pae-guide/

 

As far as tweaks, I stripped down XP to it's bare essentials using msconfig to try to lower OS RAM use as much as possible and eliminate anything running in background that could steal CPU cycles from whatever game I was playing.