Vista - making or Having 2 different profiles...

I love the eye candy of vista and when I am broswing the internet or just stretching my eyes on the different things vista does, I am happy but, when I am inside a game doing some heavy fighting and my putter starts to spit, I could care less about the Vista eye candy and all I want and need is the performance I can muster from it.

So, being said that... is there a way that I can have two profiles at the ready? One would be the standard profile I use now and at the flick of a switch (so to speak), I can turn my rig into a lean, mean performance machine and eliminate everything I don't need running in the background at that time (A.V., firewall, unnecessary processes, etc, etc.)

am I dreaming or is this the norm and I am just to dumb to have realized it sooner?

Thanks

What games are you having trouble with? I see no reason why you should have problems with the setup which you are running. Though I dont know much about your CPU I am running comparable everything else and can run all games except crysis maxed out. and crysis I runs quite well just my resolution is a little low. 1280x800 gets me completely smooth gameplay with no hitches on Enthusiast/Very High while I normally play in 1440x900 with a few hick ups when I first load a level and occasional drops here and there but I find it tolerable. If it gets on my nerves I just drop it back down and poof constant 30+ frames.

Though I do not have any anti virus or extra software running as I am a performance nut and the thing you seem to be aiming for is the norm for me. I even own norton antivirus. If I ever believe I have some kind of infection which has not happened yet with vista, I simply install it, update run a full scan and then uninstall. How many processes do you have running in total with vista? Also what anti virus do you use?

I'm running Bit Defender AntiVirus 2009 for Vista x64, vista Firewall, Task Manager shows 65 processes, Physical Mem: 35%

Of course I only have my browser open at the moment and nothing else.

I am playing CoD 5 at whatever resolution the game puts the game on (1280 x 724) I think, I am almost at the end of the campaign and I have notice a lot of stuttering on the mouse and intermitent video freezing, tenths of a second really but noticeable in a heavy firefight.

Temps on the CPU are below 50 degrees and my GPU doesn't get higher than 45 degress so I know those 2 are not the culprit either.

I could probably ask Vista or Nvidia to give me more performance but then vista looses its eye candy effect and well... what are we w/o the Vista eye candy? simpletons using Windows 2000 NT look and feel

I guess what you are saying is that there is no such thing as having two profiles ready at your fingertips then!

That is very odd. I found CoD5 to run rediculously well. I have it in 1680x1050 4xAA, 16xAF all in game settings maxed and I have not seen any lag at all. I dont think my FPS has gone below 45. I thought it was just because its a game that was made for many platforms so naturally PC runs it the best. O.o now I am really starting to think you have some kind of performance issue within your PC. Perhaps vista 64 makes that much of a difference? Though I thought 64 bit was simply supposed to make it run better? Does it in fact change visual quality or something?

Right-Click on the CoD5 shortcut, select properties, go to the "compatibility" tab, and check the "Disable Visual Themes" and "Disable Desktop Composition" check-boxes. Click Apply and then click OK. Do this for all of your full screen games from now on, it basically disables all of the Vista eye-candy while playing full screen games.

I tried this for Crysis and Far Cry 2. Was able to push the original crysis from 2xAA to 4xAA in 1360x768 using that Ultra Quality mod which someone posted the link to around these boards some where. In Far Cry 2 though I noticed almost no difference. Dont get me wrong after playing the game a bit I have had the engine kind of wear in on me and I find myself going "ok that does look pretty good" but I still think it could use some optimization and a few better textures here and there. Other than that yes it does compete with Crysis, but I prefer Crysis' more leaning toward intensely realistic look as opposed to Far Crys more artistic lush look.

It all depends on how resource intensive the game is. Regardless of the full screen application though, my method will improve performance to some degree.