Way back when, I used to be able to increase the performance of my PC by closing down unneeded progams via CTRL+ALT+DEL. For the life of me, I cannot remember what programs/operations to leave open. I remember that you WERE NOT suppose to close down systray and one or two others. Running Windows XP, Millenium Ed, with Norton Anti Virus, and Nvidia graphics card. Any help on what programs/applications can be safely closed without affecting game play, video card perfiomance, and security, from the Task Manager, would be greatly appreciated.
Well, there was a program called something like 'hijack this' which you could set the programs that start when windows starts, it is much more effective than doing it with windows program, msconfig. You can google the exe files, there are sites that inform about these exe's, you can decide which ones you'll close from there.
Try this bad boy that just came out if you have AMD cpu: http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_fusion.aspx?p=1 What it basically does is when you start a program, it will remove all the apps from memory that it doesn't require(there are basic, advance settings you can fool around with) and restores them when you quit the program. Some people report increase of up to 10fps in games. edit; there are some rumors about being able to bypass the check and make it work for intel cpus but don't have first hand knowledge.
