Tweaking a PC for Gaming

Anyone know any good ways to increase a PC's performance without adding/replacing hardware or overclocking? I know about turning off running programs like virus scanners.

depends on what OS you're running.....but generally non hardware tweaks do very little.

I'm running Windows 98.

I'm forget where it's hosted, but if you have an Nvidia card, download a small little program called RivaTuner. It has a ton of options that you can play with to make your graphics a bit worse, but your performance much more stable. I forget which options I had changed and how to change them, but there should be a forum wherever you download it that will help you out. There are a few unnecessary graphics options going on that you can turn off without taking much of a hit in quality. It can give you anywhere from 0-20 extra frames-per-second of animation depending on how much you want to turn off.

It might be hosted at http://www.tweak3d.net/, but if not, that's also a great site to browse through to tweak your computer to death.

google...search for windows 98 tweaks. also check out sharkeyextreme.com or tomshardware.com or anandtech.com. LOADS of usefull info. but like i said you're not gonna be able to pump res to the next increment or get 10 more fps from just doing OS tweaks if thats what you wanna do.

Thanks guys.

I'll be checking out that tweak3d site.

All I'm trying to do is get games that almost run playable on my machine(UT2K3 for example) to run playable. If I can get things a little less chunky, it would be great.

Those sites have plenty of info for tweaking your PC for gaming. You can also do very basic stuff like not using wallpaper, getting rid of all the sound effects in Windows (like the starting and shutting down Windows sound)... get rid of all icons except for My Computer and Recycle Bin. Dont use themes..they use up RAM.

Also..make sure that only "Systray" and "Explorer" are loaded during bootup. Makes no sense to have anything else startup...yes..even the antivirus...only load up an antivirus when you go online and download stuff, but not at startup as it uses up RAM and CPU cycles.

You can use a cache tweaking program like Cacheman which lets you adjust the amount of cache Windows uses for your hard drive, cd drive...etc. You can do it manually (they are located in your win.ini file), but Cacheman saves your old settings in case the new settings screw things over.

Other than what you find at those sites the best thing to do is upgrade your current hardware..but not everything. More RAM is always a good thing. And a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 usually costs around $165 these days (the 128 mb version), which is a great bargain. Upgrading both should give you a nice boost for gaming.

Andy8675309 should be able to help.