12:17 PM November 26, 2006

Recently came across this nifty little program called GamePrelauncher from www.GamePrelauncher.ho.com.ua , basically, it was designed to run games that require a lot of resources, like memory.

WinXP has a lot of background services running, taking up memory, that are not always necessary, especially when playing games. This FREE little utlity when setup properly will restart you computer with the minimum services running neccessary to play the game.

When you are finish playing just click on the restore button within the utility and it will restart the computer as normal with all services restored once again.

I'm not much of a gaming fan, but I am always online downloading games and programs for relatives and friends and myself (I admit I'm somewhat of a download junkie). I also have two older computers and trying to get any newer games to work on them is always a challenge.

I also found another use for the GamePreLauncer.... Burning CDs. NO its not a burning program but I only have one burner on a P2-266MHZ system with 64MB RAM. My burner is a 8x4x32 and to burn a CD I usually have to turn of as much in the background as possible. A old burner on a old computer, need I say more.

Another thing I usually have to do is to slow down my burner. My top burning speed is only 8X, but still I have to slow it down to 4X to get it to burn. And I have been doing this for years.

Its a nuscience, but neccessary. Since I have to turn of all background processes anyway, why not do it through this program and be able to turn off a little bit more. So I set it up to work through GamePreLauncher. It works like a charm, I can even burn at 8X again.

By the way, I use Nero available from http://ww2.nero.com/enu/index.html For years I used Easy CD Creator v4 from www.roxio.com/ but discoverd after an upgrade from WinME to WinXP that it will not work on WinXP. Apparently you need version 6 or higher.

There are other uses: I downloaded a video clip that is in the .mkv format. They are a high quality but resource hungry movie clip format. The movie was over 200MB in size and I couldn't play it. {remember P2-266mhz and 64mb ram}, so I decide to set up my media player through it, in this case Media Player Classic - http://www.free-codecs.com It worked for one clip but not another that I had.

As or games - I've only tried one, so far, called Twistlingo from www.gamehouse.com . I have the minimum requirements to run the game but it still wont work. So I tried it through this program, no luck. Its designed for games but the only game I've tried so far still will not work.

Even though its designed for games don't be afraid to experiment and try other programs that may be giving you trouble. When a program doesn't work it could be there is something on your system conflicting with it. Note: this program currently doesn't offer network support yet so no online gaming will work.