Hey All,

Long time lurker, first time poster.

I was out looking for a way to shut down processes and services so I could play games a little more smoothly on my now-aging P4 3.0E.

I couldn't find anything, so I wrote one.

Here's a blurb:

This handy little Windows script will kill all but the necessary/preferred services and processes in Vista, leaving you with the extra resources needed to run today's games.
Run it via an elevated command prompt with the command "cscript vgl.vbs" (Vista Orb-->Search: "cmd"-->Right Click cmd.exe-->"Run as administrator").

What it does:

• It will make two loops to kill all the dependent services and then one pass to kill all the parent services (ignoring any services included in the 'arrServicesToKeep' array).
• Next it will kill all running processes including Explorer.exe (ignoring any services included in the 'arrProcessesToKeep' array).
• You will then be presented with a prompt to either run one of the predefined games, or you can type in a full path to the program you want to run.

No settings are changed, so at any time you can simply reboot to restore the system to exactly how it was before the script was run! No worry of crashes making things "stick".

I whipped up a home page for it, so that's where I'll keep the latest version (currently version .42c):

techiestools.com -- VGL - Vista Game Launching Script

It's a .VBS script, so open it up in Notepad (or similar) and edit Process, Service and Game-Pick-List arrays to your liking/needs.

It dumps my Vista down to around 30 processes (svchosts indiviudal loads are greatly reduced as well), and frees up about 250MB from a freshly booted, idle state.

Let me know how it works for ya, and I'll try to answer any questions, but it's pretty sright-forward, I think.

And again it's safe as it makes no permanent changes, if everything seems all messed up, just reboot.

techie007

Hey again folks,

I updated the Vista Game Launcher script a bit, and the link in the original post is slightly off now (changed it over to a PHP page).

The current version is .42d, not much changed (mostly just code formatting and adding a 4th game to the pick list), but I figured I'd post about it anyhow, and say thanks to the bunch of people that tried it out.

Here's the updated link:

techiestools.com -- VGL - Vista Game Launching Script

I also posted about this version in the Vista game newsgroup, we'll see how that goes.

Again, any comments, ideas, etc. I'm interested in hearing them.

techie007