Do you shut programs down before gaming?

I have the 7811 and my gaming tends to be the 1-5 year old titles: TF2, CS:S, DoD:S, Red Orchestra. I'm finding that for these titles, I don't even need to quit out of AV, sidebar, etc. I usually maintain smooth fps at the native resolution of 1920x1200.

So how about you guys? Do you close out of every program and end every little process you can before you game?

 

I used to do that when i used to game like Deus EX or starcraft. I used to even go into the task manager and know what each program needs to be shut down and what each was.
Now with this laptop I could care less, especially when it comes down to playing last years game (and below) cuz if this laptop cannot handle 2 things at once with an old game. might as well stick to my emachine t4080 (circa 2002) Occassionally I would turn on WMP or winamp for some background music.

 

Yup, same here. I don't have the patience to run down the list of processes anymore. But this machine can more than handle the games/programs I throw at it.

 

Only if I run very intensive programs like Photoshop, etc. Otherwise I dont bother. I keep Firefox, Thunderbird, AV, etc all running

 

Try this program: SmartClose 1.1 does exactly what it says on the tin!

 

A rough answer to this question would be: the better your CPU, the more background programs you can have running. RAM isn't really a factor here, since the 7811 has 4gb. Gaming itself is more GPU intensive, so it and the background programs don't clash too much. Stock CPU on the 7811 is good enough, but upgrading it will give you at the least a tingly feeling.

On older computers, back when you used to play starcraft, I did the same thing, I would go into task manager, sort by memory usage, and shut down the top processes. This was much more of a RAM thing, back in the starcraft days, 512mb was a lot.

So back then it was a RAM thing, now it's evolved to a CPU thing.

 

Interesting explanation - thanks for the insight.