Creating a boot menu for optimized gaming.

[quadz]

Is a Core Quad more powerful than a Core Duo even in the duo runs at 3.2 and the quad runs at 2.6?

I believe it will depend at least a little bit on which generation the respective chips come from... Conroe vs. Kentsfield vs. Yorkfield, as the amount of L2 cache differs between revisions?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_2

However... Unless you have applications that are really going to put all four cores to work, you'll probably prefer the 3.2 to the 2.6.

I have a quad core, and most of the cores are idle most of the time.(*)  The occasional program will use all of them, such as Sony Vegas Pro when encoding video, which is nice.

(*) Not really idle, since the OS will use whichever core is available when a process wants to run, thus all cores see some action--but quake2 only uses about 25% of available CPU power.

I'll admit it is nice to be able to recompile a large C++ project while playing quake and have CPU left over though.

Regards,

[UUD-40]

how about unchecking all unnecessary startup services in msconfig?

 

Usually works fine for me. If things get slow after that I would consider an upgrade. fyi, don't disable PnkBstrA, Punkbuster has to run as a service to work. 

[X'tyfe]

don't disable PnkBstrA, Punkbuster has to run as a service to work. 

this is why i dont like punkbuster, when it needs a friggin service spying on my every move making sure i dont CHEAT

[WiFi_Man]

don't disable PnkBstrA, Punkbuster has to run as a service to work. 

this is why i dont like punkbuster, when it needs a friggin service spying on my every move making sure i dont CHEAT

That's treacherous computing for you.  Let's hope Vista isn't exploited for "cheat protection".


Regarding the original topic: if you really want to eliminate superfluous crap running, you could set up a minimal Linux distribution and run evilwm or the like...