Dear Bethesda, Thank you for completely destroying my productivity this week! I blame you entirely for my utter lack of contribution to society. Also, your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries. Love, Scarlett … PS: Fallout 4 – can you get on that already? Kthxbai.
Oh, most evil RPGs! Why must you suck me in with your engaging plots and intriguing quests and delicious combat? *Sigh* Alas, between requisite working and some bellyaching (literally) over not feeling well, these last few days have proven once again that I am but a weak-willed flower against the mighty seduction of my favorite video games. The feeling of immense satisfaction as I stride confidently through a screen strewn with the corpses of foes fought mightily … Hell, even the Bible is down with RPG. “Yea, thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me.”
Except that I’m usually the harbinger of death n’ evil n’ stuff. But it’s a minor detail, really.
Ahhh, but my recent re-installation of Fallout 3 did prove to be beneficial in more ways than just the time-suckage variety. Remembering my trials and travails last year with low frame rates, micro stuttering, and hourly crashes, I decided to ready my PC in a most triumphant fashion. Which was an enjoyable project in and of itself, as being the lovably dorky computer geek I am, I’m endlessly trying to eek more power out of my rather modest system: 2 GHz AMD Dual Core Opteron processor, 2.0 GB of RAM, ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card, 250 GB hard drive, Windows XP.
What’s that, you say? I could save myself the time and trouble by simply upgrading? Bah! Upgrades are for pussies (and, y’know, people who can afford them). Besides, I’m rather fond of my older system. I have a brand new copy of Windows 7 gathering dust, and nary a desire to install it. Yeah, I’m a hardcore XP’er and for all intents and purposes, my system runs really well. But I’m a born tweaker and tinkerer, and any tricks or routines that I can use to give my baby a little extra juice is well worth the time and effort.
And thus, I present you with Scarlett’s Guide to Making Your PC Gaming-Ready. Or, “Shit I Did to Get Fallout 3 Running Smoothly.” Take your pick ;-)
Step One: Get thee to TweakGuides.com. NAO!
Alright – to be fair, I’ve downloaded the Windows XP TweakGuide and I’ve gone through parts of it, but I still haven’t had the will or wherewithal to sit down and attack the project thoroughly. HOWEVER! I fully intend to … Someday. But the TweakGuides site is chock full of great information, including guides for special tweaks and settings to get particularly graphics-intensive games to run to their best ability. If you’re new to PC tinkering and/or you’d like a very clear, step-by-step set of guidelines written in understandable language, I highly recommend giving TG a look!
Step Two: Upgrade your video drivers.
This is advice that I give out constantly on TSE to folks who have trouble getting the videos to work properly – but it’s something that I rarely remember to do myself. So when I noticed that ATI had released new drivers only 3 weeks ago, I used TG’s instructions for clean-uninstalling my previous drivers and getting all set up with the new ones. Now if you’re not too familiar your system specs, Belarc Advisor is a fantastic free program that runs a quick diagnostic and gives you detailed information about your PC that you can use for a myriad of purposes. In my case, I used it to double-check my ATI graphics card model so I could be sure to download the correct driver package. I also used Driver Sweeper to clean up traces of my old, outdated drivers before installing the new ones. It’s a perfect little program for folks like myself who are hesitant to mess with your PC’s registry, which can become brutally fucked up if you delete the wrong key. Better safe than sorry, I say!
At this point, I went ahead and installed the game (and applied the most recent patch), and then I proceeded to …
Step Three: Deleting and downsizing.
I am all about cleaning my cookies, cache and temp files – and there are some great apps that take care of the whole shebang. My favorites are ATF Cleaner (light-weight but effective) and CCleaner (thorough and robust). You might wonder why I use both, and that’s because in testing, both programs left bits and pieces behind that the other took care of – and they’re both so quick and simple to use, it’s worth using them in conjunction. What I also love about CCleaner is that it includes a registry cleaner, a monitor for your start-up programs, and a built-in uninstaller that always seems to perform much faster than the ol’ Add/Remove Programs routine.
After all my temp files were thoroughly obliterated, I ran another one of my favorite little apps called SpaceSniffer. I tweeted about this program a few weeks ago and it caused a minor flurry of replies and DMs singing its praise. So what does it do? Not much, really … Except that it shows you, in a simple but effective graphic format, where all the space on your hard drive is being used up. Folders filled with old save game files, raw images downloaded from your digital camera, gigs of mp3s … It’s amazing how much space gets devoted to things we don’t give much thought to, but when you take the time to clear out old data and files that you no longer need, you’ll free up valuable space AND make it much faster to run full system diagnostics. The first time I ran SpaceSniffer, I was able to root out almost 20 gigs of extraneous files I no longer needed. 20 gigs! At the time, I only had a 150 GB hard drive, so freeing up that much space was massive. Even if you’re one of the lucky ones with a terabyte drive and legions of extra space, it’s still a great little app for being able to visualize where the space on your drive is being allocated, and finding any surprising space-hogs that might be left over after you uninstall games and programs. I dig it!
Step Four: Defrag and optimize.
Ahhh, the dreaded defragment. PC World said in it’s latest issue that it was a largely unnecessary process for folks with decent computers running a modern OS, but I’ve always noticed a substantial speed increase after a defrag/optimize session, and that alone is worth the time it takes. The good news is that the programs mentioned in Step Three will help to streamline your system so the defragger has less muck to muddle through on your PC. And there’s more good news! I’ve found a fabulous little program that will defragment and optimize your hard drive(s) quicker than the built-in Windows routine, and it it has lots of little features that can streamline the process for the future.
MyDefrag may be look unimpressive at first with its very basic interface, but it gets the job done efficiently and completely, and I can honestly say that its process has produced the most noticeable improvement to the speed of my computer over any other defragger. There are three basic routines to choose from that are meant to be run Daily, Weekly, and Monthly. (You can set up schedules if you like – personally, I prefer to run it on demand.) Since I hadn’t defragmented in a while and I had just installed new drivers and a new game, I decided to go for the Weekly (“middle ground”) routine, which defrags and optimizes without the lengthy file sorting. It still took about 3 hours to complete, but once it had finished and I rebooted my system, the speed improvement was immediate and definite.
Step Five: PLAY!
Survey says? Whether it was one tweak or the combination of everything I’d done, Fallout 3 is running FAR more smoothly than it was last year. I still experience a crash after 5 or 6 hours of cumulative gameplay, but the graphics are smooth as butter using the settings that the game launcher recommended based on my system (medium). It looks great, plays like a dream, and is even more addictive than I recall, especially with all the new DLC packs. (New quest lines! New weapons! New NPCs to murder ruthlessly! Om nom nom.)
So if you don’t get another post for a little while, blame Bethesda! In the meantime, I’ll be wandering about with my Xuanlong Assault Rifle and my radio tuned to the sweet vintage sounds of GNR, ready to to wreak some havoc the likes of which the Wasteland ain’t never seen. Don’t wait up. ;-)
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