Improve PC Game Performance
Well we all need to take a break from our online work, and what better way to relax than hurling yourself into an online battlefield with 64 other human players?! It's great fun, except when your computer has a heart attack every time you turn around in-game.
Battlefield 2 (or BF2) for those of you who don't know, is a very engaging first-person war game, in which you can fight as many different types of soldier, fly helicopters, planes, drive tanks and humvees, and pretty much anything else you can imagine.
It's also very very resource intensive, needing a fast CPU, loads of RAM, and decent video card to even play the game comfortably.
Now as I discovered last night, BF2 gaming performance can be drastically effected even on a machine which you've played it plenty of times before. I started up BF2, and with the harddrive thrashing with every event in-game, it quickly became apparent that the game was virtually unplayable! I had to do something to try and reclaim some of the gaming performance.
So, I downloaded the latest Nvidia drivers, and installed them.
Then I realized that my primary harddrive was hideously fragmented, so I deleted a whole bunch of stuff I didn't need, and cleared up about 10GB right away.
Then I downloaded CCleaner, and ran it, which in a few minutes managed to clear another 10GB of temp files, and crash dump files and other useless GB stealing crud.
Next, I ran the standard WindowsXP defrag utility, which is found in:
Start > Accessories > System Tools > DiskDefrag
This did a good job defragmenting most of the harddrive, except for the Page file and other locked windows files. This was crucial to get defragmented as well, as most of the time when Battlefield 2 was spluttering and pausing during online play was when the harddrive started thrashing away trying to keep up with all the data being loaded during gameplay.
So, I searched around, and found this handy tool, which can schedule a Pagefile defrag on next reboot.
Page Defrag
After running that, I started Battlefield 2 back up, and what a change! BF2 is now performing much better, and is actually playable once more! From totally unplayable, to almost lag free, in only about an hours time.
