For those on a quest for low-latency:

[metamorphosis]

I find Gamebooster works fine - it can disable services just as well as this does and you can set it up to disable and then restore with one click what you want. Plus it's free with an enhanced version for just $10 - can't see what this one costs on the site.

Gamebooster disables about half the stuff that prelauncher does - and has about half as much effect - both on games and other apps.
Just in case you missed that the first time. There's benchmarks you can search for.

[metamorphosis]

Just a bit of background info-
the game prelauncher disables about 120-160 windows processes, dependent on the ver of windows you're running and what options you tick. Services are a subset of processes. Processes include services, programs, drivers, and other background windows processes. For a demo:



That's gamebooster. Gamebooster disables around 20-30 processes on average, from what I've read.




That's gameprelauncher.
[open pics in new tab to view full scale]



What the pics don't show you are the invisible processes - drivers, networking, other background processes.

Often when people read about this they think oh it's just services stuff - services are a subsection, and a small one-
the reason it needs to restart is that many processes such as virus scanners and drivers run at ring 0 ie. kernel mode, which requires a restart.

ps. From my reading GP does not disable any drivers by default (except for perhaps networking and wifi if you check those boxes), but you can disable them in the tools->drivers section, if you want to free up ram/interrupts (not that drivers take up much ram, but hey there might be that one annoying driver that causes problems). This can be useful for, for example, disabling ACPI battery on laptops to reduce DPC spikes (talk to jschilds about that one) when doing DAW work, but enabling it for normal windows usage so that you are able to conserve power usage when doing normal windows stuff and/or unplugged.

[aMUSEd]

I find Gamebooster works fine - it can disable services just as well as this does and you can set it up to disable and then restore with one click what you want. Plus it's free with an enhanced version for just $10 - can't see what this one costs on the site.

Gamebooster disables about half the stuff that prelauncher does - and has about half as much effect - both on games and other apps.
Just in case you missed that the first time. There's benchmarks you can search for.

Maybe but its disabling stuff I need and messing up my shell settings and god knows what else - I could set Gamebooster to just disable everything too but I prefer to control what it does so I'll stick with Gamebooster - this thing is too indiscriminate and not fully tested

[audiojunkie]

I don't necessarily think it is untested; it assumes a standard unmodified OS. Your OS is already heavily modified for low resource usage. You are running BBLean as a shell. I don't think GamePreLauncher plans for that.

Also, I'm willing to bet that there is a way to turn on your low level drivers that you are needing too. My only concern right now about it, is that it is using a form of Challenge/Response copy protection. If it didn't use that, I would probably have snapped it up by now.

Starting from a basically unmodified system, it appears to do a pretty good job. It may need a few adjustments, but amazingly, it really seems to save a lot of resources.

By the way, Gamebooster has their version 3 beta out, and it is available to download and test. I notice that it frees a lot more resources than Gamebooster v2., and still maintains the easy one-button formula. It may be woth checking out for comparison here.

--Sean

[metamorphosis]

Maybe but its disabling stuff I need and messing up my shell settings and god knows what else - I could set Gamebooster to just disable everything too but I prefer to control what it does so I'll stick with Gamebooster - this thing is too indiscriminate and not fully tested

That's the thing - it's far more tested. But because it does far more, yes it should support service selection as well. I'll recommend that to the guys making it. Okay so one aspect (disabling explorer) doesn't work for your particular system, because of the alternative shell you use (which is not common)- but you can work around that by just not disabling explorer. But gamebooster just doesn't have the level of abilities that this has.

On my system, I'm running nlite'd with virtually everything stripped out, so that's pretty non-standard. Works well.

[audiojunkie]

Maybe but its disabling stuff I need and messing up my shell settings and god knows what else - I could set Gamebooster to just disable everything too but I prefer to control what it does so I'll stick with Gamebooster - this thing is too indiscriminate and not fully tested

That's the thing - it's far more tested. But because it does far more, yes it should support service selection as well. I'll recommend that to the guys making it. Okay so one aspect (disabling explorer) doesn't work for your particular system, because of the alternative shell you use (which is not common)- but you can work around that by just not disabling explorer. But gamebooster just doesn't have the level of abilities that this has.

On my system, I'm running nlite'd with virtually everything stripped out, so that's pretty non-standard. Works well.

I was playing with the GameBooster v3 beta last night, and it now has an option to disable the explorer.....amongst other things. It's made some good improvements apparently.

--Sean

[metamorphosis]

I was playing with the GameBooster v3 beta last night, and it now has an option to disable the explorer.....amongst other things. It's made some good improvements apparently.

Disabling the explorer isn't hard - just open task manager and kill explorer. If it manages to match 120-160 processes, I'll be surprised.

Maybe but its disabling stuff I need and messing up my shell settings

If that one service is the only one you need, just create a .bat file with "sc start [service name]" in it, and add that to your program profile. Oh, and don't tick 'turn off explorer'.
Cheers,
Matt

[Debby747]

Another way to start a needed service would be to add
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe to the profile
and run "services.msc"

Greetings
D.

EDIT:
You don't even need to add it - there's already a "Run" command in the Tools menu!

[Debby747]

I have just bought the software and talked to the developer -

1. The key is tied to the motherboard, respectively, it will not run on other machines with another motherboard. The key is not tied to other components of the computer like hard drives, CPU. and so on.

2. The key is not dependent on Windows and will work after you reinstall Windows, as well as two or more simultaneously installed OS Windows.

Well, I don't like C/R at all. But this is one of those cases where it's convenient enough to not worry over it.

Game Prelauncher seems very robust and reliable.
And its developer Alexander is very kind and responsive.


Greetings
D.

[audiojunkie]

This is good to know. Thanks.

--Sean

[cyphersuit]

I downloaded Gameprelauncher and after using it, some of my Sonar X1 problems disappeared.

But I am new to this - can I deactivate the windows shell?

how do i know which drivers to deactivate for my X1 profile? most of them are not known to me and i can not find out how necessary they are

[Debby747]

Yes, you can safely disable the windows shell.
What happens is that when you boot to Game Mode, your screen will be black/empty,
apart from the Game Prelauncher main window and the program(s) you've chosen to add to your started profile.

A minimal file browser is planned for a future update, but I don't know when that will be.


Concerning switching off drivers - you shouldn't do that.
You can if you know exactly why you want to do that.
They will only be disabled in Game Mode, not in your real system -

but there should be no performance gain from switching off drivers.

Greetings
D.

[audiojunkie]

It just occurred to me that Gamebooster v3 beta has the capability disable the windows shell and it boots to a game mode just like GamePreLauncher. Maybe with this new version, the differences between the features these two apps are narrowing.

--Sean

[thereynolds]

I'm using an NI Audio Kontrol 1 USB audio card with my laptop; when I boot using Game Prelauncher, there is no power to the AK1. Any ideas how to fix this? Thanks!

-Mike

[metamorphosis]

I'm using an NI Audio Kontrol 1 USB audio card with my laptop; when I boot using Game Prelauncher, there is no power to the AK1. Any ideas how to fix this? Thanks!

-Mike

Hi Mike-
it may be, like with aMused's NI service, that there is a service that NI installs for the device. If you can find out by going control panel->administrative tools->services and looking for NI or native instruments or Kontrol.
Once you've found it, you'll be able to start it using my batch file suggestion further up the page.
Each game prelauncher profile can run as many apps as you want in sequence - so you just stick the 'service start' batch file in front of the actual application.
Either that or follow debby's suggestion above.
If it's not a service, I'm stumped.