Do you turn off Vista sidebar before you game XD

Hi everyone,

Vista Sidebar has been a very interesting phenomena for me... on my desktop (AMD X2 5600, X1600XT, 1GB DDR1, 1TB HDD in total) it consumes about 10~16% of my CPU usage constantly (I have a CPU meter on my sidebar), on my new laptop now (see signature), it fluctuates from 3% ~ 12%.

Is Vista Sidebar affecting anyone's gaming experience out there?

 

i never use the side bar. as far as im concerned it increases start up time, consumes processor time and shows you nothing you cant find out already.

 

i recently shut off everything in vista that i dont use (and this was included) since i only use vista for gaming anyway. I dont need any of these things...

I really didnt notice any difference in gaming or fps or anything, but its only been a day, so...

and, how do you know how much the sidebar itself uses? if you shut off the sidebar you no longer have the gadget thing so how do you tell?

 

Task manager.

 

I stopped using the sidebar a while ago. I decided that the increased start up time and risk of higher CPU usage wasn't worth it. I don't game, so I can't give a comparison, but as of the last time I stopped using it things feel a tiny bit faster. I used to like it, but its just not worth it to me now.

 

Thanks for the feedback everyone,

yeah I do feel it sometimes randomly spikes up and use up to 20% of CPU usage for a little while and if I'm gaming during that time, the game spikes too ><

I guess Sidebar is just for the Visual.

 

I turn it off only when I play Crysis.

 

I also don't use the sidebar. The reason i have is just the same as the other ones

 

I don't use it.... last thing i need cluttering up my desktop is a poor rip-off of Widgets.

 

I don't use the sidebar, but that's just because I didn't particularly like it.

 

I never use it, takes up too much room and bugs me.

 

I didn't like it, and I am just running the Windows Classic theme. There was too much 'coolness' getting in my way. I guess I am just not cool

 

I use it, if you honestly care about a little extra gaming performance you have to rethink having Vista on your system.

 

agreed 100%

 

i use it too. its alright and pretty neat, not much of a gamer myself.

 

Had to disable Sidebar due to a documented overflow error which resulted in my music player crashing the system. It also uses up system RAM better assigned to running games.

 

vista came with my laptop and im not about to buy XP and then try to find drivers for it, so im trying to make the best of it

 

I'm using it from time to time just because I like gadgets in general (I think it looks kinda cool ). When I'm gaming I throw it away because of the CPU and DDR usage.

 

well kinda liked it when the lappy was new.. and it looked kinda cool... nowadays its off... don't want any fancy thing hogging my system's precious resources.

 

My sidebar is always off. Anyone know how to turn it back on?

 

Yes.

You may access and restart the Sidebar by using the start menu's search box. Searching under the keyword "side" and click on "Windows Sidebar." The Sidebar can also be found in the start menu listed under the Accessories folder.

 

start>run>sidebar

 

I turned it off like 2 days after I got it. Installed vista, it pulled up, I added some gadgets, was like...cool...then next time I restarted, I turned it off, and every time after that I closed it, too. Eventually got to the point where I said screw it and just stopped it from starting, it's pretty worthless, IMO.