Optimizing Windows 7 for Gaming on a Mac

[MetalLight]

I've primarily been a mac user for most of my life. While I still love the OS, I've known for a long time that my gaming options are more limited than they are on Windows. So when bootcamp was made available, I jumped on the chance to be able to play many of the games I'd missed out on over the years, as well as the new releases.

While the standard installation that I've wound up with through both Apple's Bootcamp and Windows 7 is fine, I wonder if I might be able to improve performance beyond what I currently have (without overclocking anything).

Keep in mind that I'm a bit of a laymen when it comes to the technical side of Windows, so bear with me.

There are two main reasons I suspect my machine might be underperforming:
1) Under Processes in Task Manager, I see 8 Local Services, 7 User, 2 Network, and 29 System. I wonder how many of these are bloat vs necessary.
2) Under services, I see 71 running and an even larger quantity stopped. Is this average?

I'm running on a relatively fresh install, and aside from windows updates, I've only installed Steam and roughly 10 games, Origin, Fraps, Chrome, 7zip, and a small handful of other odds and ends.

I also wonder what other bits of optimization there are. For example, every now and then Windows will ask if it should change my theme to a less intensive one. Are there other things like this that I can do to increase speed, even slightly?

 

[saturnotaku]

For example, every now and then Windows will ask if it should change my theme to a less intensive one.

Can't say I've ever seen that message before, and I've been using Boot Camp in various forms since 2007 (with XP and Vista) and using Windows 7 on Macs and PCs since the OS released.

With Windows 7 performance tweaking, I have done pretty much every tip, trick, whathaveyou, and none of them have made a perceptible difference in system operation. The only one that made even a slight improvement was disabling Aero peek. Right now, when installing Windows on my Mac, I shrink the size of the pagefile/swap file and disable hibernation, not because it makes my machine perform better, but it simply frees up space on my SSD. The final performance "tweak" is making sure my graphic drivers are more up to date than the ones Apple provides in its Windows support software package.

That's it. Otherwise I let Windows 7 do its thing the way MS designed it, and it works remarkably well. I actually spend more time tweaking OS X, though admittedly much of that is spent optimizing my SSD.