Friday, December 30, 2011

Side-Topic: Optimizing Windows 7 for SWTOR

SWTOR forum member renegadeimp posted a guide a couple weeks back on how to take all the pretty out of Windows 7 and make low-med range systems run SWTOR ridiculously fast by comparison.  It involves tweaking and/or disabling a lot of system settings and getting deep into the weeds on what services you'll keep running (I didn't go for all the suggested settings, but I did most).

Of course, for those that don't want the permanence of these settings, there's also Game Booster, which takes care of most of the services renegadeimp shows you how to disable.  Game Booster temporarily shuts off the biggest resource hogs not needed during gameplay, then reenables them with the click of a button.

This intrigued me, especially with the resources I'm already sacrificing running two separate programs to use my controller.  And seeing as I play SWTOR on my 2-year-old MacBook Pro, and only use Windows 7 for gaming (and therefore don't care how ugly it looks), I decided to try this out by using both options.

Holy crap.

No really, holy crap.  I went from playing at 1280x800 on medium settings to 1600x1000 on max settings.  And no framerate issues.  Oh good god this is amazing.  I even dialed up the grass and tree quality!  If you guys don't have the most powerful system ever, and you want to improve your performance, at least give Game Booster a shot.

(And for the love of God, set a System Restore point before you try fiddling with your registry!)

2 comments:

  1. Can you tell me how you get game booster to work with SWTOR and PGP? I just don't understand the steps as to which one to run first.

    I know that you have to have PGP on and running to play SWTOR with the controller, so I usually lanuch SW from PGP. But if I run game booster first, the desktop closes/ disappears and I can't run PGP. So I put PGP in GB to run it from the game box, but opening PGP switched from boosted mode to normal mode, and didn't even launch the game.

    Then I tried opening PGP, then running GB and launching SWTOR from the gamebox, this also failed, switching back to normal mode and not even opening SWTOR.

    Can you please tell me how you get it to work, cause my comp is older and I could really use it too. It says it can boost my performance by up to 44%, which I would love to see, but I can't get the 2 programs to work together.

    I have it set NOT to load PGP on startup, as my boyfriend complains it takes too long and holds other things up when he wants to use the computer for other stuff. Could this be causing the problem? Thnaks heaps

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  2. It's ok, I've figured it out. I had told Game Booster to disable explorer (the toolbar and windows desktop) and once I re-enabled this I could run GB then launch SWTOR from PGP. Works great now. My bad.

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