A Small Guide for PC Gamers

[boogieboy]

Here i'm going to give some of the very important tips especially for people who are new to PC Games and want to play games on there Windows 7 OS without any hassle, crashes or performance issues etc.

Steps need to follow after the Fresh Install of Windows 7 OS:

1. Install Chipset Drivers for your Motherboard.

2. Install Sound Drivers.

3. Download and Install Microsoft DirectX 9 Redist (June 2010) from the following link - (this is a very important update that is required by most of the older and new games which is not included in the default OS disc):
DirectX 9 (Redist June 2010)

4. Download Latest Drivers for your GPU from the following links:
AMD/ATI Drivers
NVidia Drivers

5. Download and Install latest NVIDIA PhysX System Software - (this is also a very important software that is required by PhysX supported games no matter you have NVidia or AMD GPU... for example Metro 2033 requires this software and will not run unless you install it even with AMD GPU's):
PhysX System Software (hard to find the link? see the Picture below)

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Make sure to install latest Patches for Games and keep your Windows 7 OS updated also try not to install the Games on the OS drive (example C: Drive) and always install your games on other drive if you have. Make sure to disable your Anti-Virus before playing the game (I use Microsoft Security Essential which i think is the best and free Anti-Virus so far and use low resource usage) by following these steps i can assure that you will not have any problem running games.

 

[Mits]

My opinion is that when saying "always install your games on other drive if you have" you should have clarified that you meant another physical drive and not just another partition on the same hard disk as C:

Installing a game on a different partition of the boot hard disk would provide no significant advantage, except perhaps a slight (<1%) increase of disk operation speeds during the gaming, due to the lower fragmentation of the partition containing the game.

Having a second drive for gaming installations is not only a matter of game optimization. In my humble opinion, step "zero", before even fresh installing Windows 7 (or any OS at that matter), is to purchase a second hard disk for your data, documents, pics, movies etc. Keeping all user data in the default "My Documents" location is the worst decision Microsoft ever made for a default, and has cost thousands (if not millions) of users to lose precious data. The boot drive will be the first to fail, as it is constantly doing read/write operations. The second hard disk will increase the probability of all your precious data (including gaming data) being safe, in case the boot drive fails (develops bad sectors or gets damaged hardwarewise).