Need Help With Vista? Tips with pictures inside!

[SuperBallz]

First thing before you read this, I'm going start off with the basic things to check before you do what I have done.

ALWAYS TRY RIGHT CLICKING AND RUNNING AS ADMINISTRATOR FIRST. IF THAT FAILS, GO TO THE SMALLBALL ICON AND RIGHT CLICK ON IT, THEN CLICK PROPERTIES. ONCE YOU HAVE DONE THAT, GO TO THE COMPATIBILITY TAB AND CHECK THE BOX BY "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" AND SELECT "Windows XP (Service Pack 2)".**

** I have found that running it in Windows XP (Service Pack 2) can help. Although I can play smallball on Vista without any problems, Player Optimizer wouldn't work until I did that. So who knows, maybe that can help you.

I believe Wookie told this to someone, and I just copy and pasted from the thread I saw. The smallball files (smallball.exe and start.jar) need to be compatible with a lower version of windows, but the trainer files (trainerapp.exe and dt.exe) do not.

Check this thread out for Java information. http://www.smallball.org/index.php/topic,3793.0.html

One last thing to check before you try out any of this stuff I posted below. Right click the smallball icon, go to where it says "target" and put "C:\My Games\SmallBall\start.jar"

I just copy and pasted this from my Call of Duty 2 clan's forums. This was basically meant to help my game run better but it may have also helped smallball run better for me on vista.

The underlined portion is Optional. I believe its just to help your computers performance with Vista.


Microsoft's answer to reducing disk access is to get 2GB+ of memory. I haven't done this yet but I imagine it would help immensely. Instead, I ran the process monitor to find the offending processes hogging all the resources. The biggest hogs were System Restore and the Indexing Service. I went in and turned them off through the vista interface (rather than just turning the services off in services.msc) and all was good. System Restore is good if you like restore points in case you jack something up but I'd rather do manual clean reinstalls anyways. Indexing is good for searches but if you're not doing 10+ searches every day then who cares if it takes 30 secs longer. Indexing service also takes up a bunch of needless disk space. Also turn off "Themes", which if your wife likes all the pretty eye candy stuff like mine does, this will really piss her off but she'll get used to it.

Ok, I dont think user account control has anything to do with it because mine is still turned on.

I also went into the smallball executable right clicked it, hit properties, and set it to run in Win XP Compatibility mode. This made it more stable and less likely to crash my comp.

Turn off all the eye candy (windows side bars, transition effects, etc), this stuff uses a crapload of your memory. After turning off the Vista side bar things, go into System Properties, Advance Tab, select Settings, and hit the radio button that says "Adjust for Best Performance." Also go into your Personalization tab after right-clicking desktop, navigate through and find the pulldown that changes your view to "Windows Classic", it's more spartan but less resource-intensive.

Went into the nVidia Control Panel. Picked the advanced settings. Set everything I could to "Application Controlled" and anything that had the word "optimization" i turned to on.
Hope this helps some of you.

IF YOU NEED ANYMORE KIND OF VISTA HELP, LET ME KNOW AND I CAN TRY TO HELP YOU OUT. O0


Updated: March 10th, 2008. 9:26PM PST

[SuperBallz]

Sorry that these pics are small, but i believe u guys can make them out.


Here's how to get rid of indexing. Open your control panel and click on System Maintenance. Start > Control Panel > System Maintenance



Then click on Indexing Options. (Dont mind the box i made on the top left, i forgot to erase it)



Then click modify.



Then click on show all locations and a list of things will come up. Just make sure all of them are NOT checked. Empty boxes like this.

[SuperBallz]

Now for themes. I'm exactly sure how to turn them off, but I'm gonna try to help you out with these pics. The guy walked me through it on Teamspeak (which is sort of explanatory, you can talk verbally to other people with this program.)

Open up your Control Panel, then Appearance and Personalization, and finally click Themes. Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Themes. Like this







Thats the screen I get when I click Themes.

Now the part that might help you guys out in a bigger photo.

[SuperBallz]

Now find your Smallball icon, right click it, and click Properties. Then go to the top and click compatibility.






Click the box next to the words "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" The click the drop down box and click on Windows XP (Service Pack 2).

[SuperBallz]

Now finally with the graphics card help. Mine is a NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE so the graphics card control panel is going to be called NVIDIA Control Panel.

Open up the Control Panel, then click Additional Options, then NVIDIA Control Panel, the it will open a new window and you will click on 3D Settings, then Manage 3D Settings, and make everything like the bottom 2 pictures.















Now to change the settings like I have them, all you have to do is click on the thing you want, and on the right, a drop down box will appear. Click on it and select the one that I'm using.





I sure hope that this helps out your guys' vista problems.

I went ahead and made this a sticky..
There is just WAY too much valuable information here to ever let this thread slip off the first page.

Good work! Maybe this will help alot of people in the future as more and more people replace older PCs or change over to the new OS Vista..


Cleaned up thread - Wookie8662.

[SuperBallz]

edited it today with just a little bit more information.. the basics

[SuperBallz]

Added an extra on top, I found it to work for player optimizer. So if you want to use it and you have vista, there's the solution to fix your Player Optimizer problem. If it still doesn't work, then you're pretty much out of luck.