Windows Vista was not well received by gamers, despite the introduction by Microsoft of the Games for Windows branding, with stringent rules and guidelines for software companies on how their games should run and behave.

The reason for this is that Windows Vista is simply too resource heavy.  It has far too much running in the background and the best efforts of Microsoft with the release of service pack 1, okay so they didn’t do anything for gamers really, hasn’t changed the situation.

This means that all the PC gamers I know have dual-boot systems running both Windows XP and Windows Vista.  When I’m setting up a gaming system I’ll strip XP down to its basics, without even any security such as anti-virus software and a firewall.  I’ll stop almost every service from running, these are small programs that are part of Windows that do specific tasks like managing printing, audio playback or networking, as let’s be honest you’ll never need to print from Gears of War, and uninstall every Windows component I can.  The only software that’ll ever be installed in these copies of Windows XP will be games.  This means that the games can take full control of the system and run to their maximum potential.  There will be absolutely nothing running in the background that isn’t completely essential.

It’s important to note that if you’re creating a stripped-down Windows XP installation, it’s normally a good idea to uninstall Internet Explorer, to make sure you won’t expose Windows to viruses and trojans that, frankly, you’ll never detect as you won’t have any security software installed or running.  Obviously, the Windows Vista installation is for everything else, like detecting viruses. 

There have been calls for some years now for a gaming mode for Windows.  A special mode you can switch or boot into in which the only things that are running are the things you need for gaming.  It never appeared and, recently, AMD released Fusion, a gaming mode tool that, unfortunately, you’d only get the best out of if you have an AMD motherboard or an ATI graphics card.  Worse, it’s fiddly to set up unless you really know what you’re doing.

Then came great news!  Windows 7, or whatever it finally ends up being called is having a new system to manage the services.  From now on, only the services you actually needwill ever run.  But this obviously means there’ll be still no gaming mode for Windows.

So what does this mean and why is it going to only mean more of the same for gamers?  Let’s look at some scenarios and ask some questions.

When will Windows switch services on?  Will this happen when software is installed or when you run it after booting into Windows?  If it’s the former then will the service be switched off if you uninstall the software and nothing else needs to use it?  I would think this scenario unlikely.  What then will happen if you have a start-up program that needs one of these services.  You’ll fairly obviously shut this software down before running your game but the service will still be running.

Windows might be leaner and running fewer of the things, but this is still a long way from a dedicated gaming mode.  Even with the release of Fusion I’m still not recommending anyone only have a single operating system on their PC if they’re truly serious about gaming.  If for no other reason that the software companies that write these things, you know who you are, are notorious for sloppy coding.  Frequent software patches are common, often to fix problems caused by the last patch!

I’ll be writing a series, it’ll probably have to be a long one too, on how to set up a gaming PC for maximum performance.  For the foreseeable future though, and by that I mean the next six or seven years at least, a dual-boot system of Windows XP and Windows Vista/7 will still be the order of the day.