In this article I would like to discuss a much requested feature in Windows… “Gaming Mode”.
Simply put, Windows as you all no doubt know, is bloated. Previous versions have suffered from having too many services running in the background and Vista’s performance was a complete dog. I have met very few people who are even prepared to play online games in Vista, they’re sticking with XP.
That OS had its faults too though which included a Data Execution Prevention system that thought some games were viruses.
As I’m sure you know the essence of a gaming mode is a stripped down version of the OS, running only what’s absolutely essential to run your game happily. Games these days are extremely demanding on even the best hardware and, let’s face it, not many of us have a couple of thousand to spend on a PC.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on this because, although Windows 7 is leaner and much quicker than Vista, I still can’t see gamers rallying around it. Also the new ‘XP Mode’ won’t sadly act as a substitute for a gaming mode as it’s only a glorified version of Microsoft Virtual PC, which was also a dog.
I believe that we’ll never see a dedicated gaming mode in Windows, Microsoft just won’t concede that stuff needs to be switched off in order to have a happy computing experience because…
A) The likes of Google, Real Networks and other companies who have sued Microsoft in the past will use it as absolute proof that features such as Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player et al can be happily removed from the OS forever and…
B) Because they’ll just say it’ll make the system extremely insecure and prone to all sorts of meanies and nasties. Even though this probably wouldn’t be true.
There is an alternative however and it’s one I’m going to examine in more detail ready for the official launch of Windows 7. What’s more, it’s one that can be back-ported to both Windows XP and Vista. Quite simply, the magic alternative is PowerShell, Microsoft’s scripted replacement for the ‘should have been dead long ago’ DOS prompt.
PowerShell allows you to write scripts to automate jobs such as switching services on and off, and I’m going to look into writing a PowerShell script in the near future to provide the optimum streamlined gaming experience for a standard Windows installation.
Will this convince hard core gamers to switch to Windows 7? To be honest I believe they’ll eventually make the switch anyway unless we start reading horror stories as we did with Vista, which isn’t very likely. This won’t be because of Windows 7 however, it’ll probably be because of massively quick new hardware that will mean any lags in the OS really won’t be noticable any more. Every little extra to help though can only be a good thing.
Do any of you already have PowerShell scripts which can do this? If so feel free to post links to them here. :)
