Aside from some errors, it's not too bad.

Some that i noticed after a quick glance...

Malwarebytes you have listed under Anti-Virus, it is not AV it is anti malware/spyware

Peripheral hardware being USB over PS/2 makes no difference in gaming. Sometimes in fast paced First Person Shooters older usb mice can lag a few milliseconds in its response time, but does nothing to effect Frame Rate.

You want GPU Accelerated Particles to be turned ON not OFF to help FPS.

Sound. Given the minimum requirements to play STO, if you meet these then sound will not cause you any loss of fps, especially if you have a sound card, which most gamers do. If you are among the "casual" gamers then you may have just an onboard audio card, which still would not effect fps due to the multi core cpu.

If you put all your video settings to what you recommend then STO will look like some MMO from the 90's.

I would STRONGLY advise people to not use Viper's Process Guide unless they are very comfortable with making changes to their computer that may very well render it inoperable if done wrong, resulting in a need for a total reinstall of the OS

Good advice would be to make sure your drivers are current, windows is updated, HD is defragged, and you click the "Recommended" button under video settings. Things should work pretty well from there.

I applaud the effort though even if I don't agree with the advice.

I appreciate and agree with the System Tweaks section of your guide, but I don't understand the point of explaining how to turn all the in game settings down. I assume everyone would already know that to improve framerate, they need to lower settings. All systems are different, and any combination of adjustments being just one singe option or ten, could have different results for different users.

If a complete tech noob came in and followed your guide, lowering all the settings to what you wrote in yellow, they would log into a game that looked no better 1980's Space Invaders for the Atari 2600.

Again, cheers for the system tweaks section, that kind of stuff really helps people out. I defrag and run CCleaner weekly myself.

Well, /fpsgraph 1 will turn on a graph to show spikes in fps slowdown (purple spikes). I'm still hunting for a FPS command that will display a numerical value, maybe if a Dev would read this they could point it out for us?

Well, we agree on some points but not others.

- USB devices CAN drain resources. Back in like 02' I played EQ for a few months, on a PII 600 Mhz 64 mb ram crap Intel onboard video and sound. Needless to say my FPS was crap, and I was using a USB keyboard and mouse at the time. Sometimes my system would be so slow, I'd take a look at System Resources (this was 98SE) and see it down at like 80% or less, with just the login screen for EQ up. When I switched to a typical PS/2 setup, that percentage went from 80's up to 90's. Sure, it may have been just a weird system config but USB devices draw power and resources from a PC, and like the guide says most modern PC's don't have any issues with this but hey, ya never know for an older machine.

- Sound can affect performance, if you're using onboard sound, a single core CPU, with not a lot of ram and onboard video? Yea, turning off sounds will net you a few more frames. Every bit of resources your system can save on such a low end pc as that example, is helpful.

- Oh it will "look" like crap, I agree but it will be playable. For some people, they'd rather have bad looking graphics and the ability to play rather than pretty graphics and a frame rate so low it's impossible to play.

As for Black Viper's guide, as long as you are smart about it, do some research, it's fine if you follow it. If you are unsure what a process does, Services.msc lists a description on the left hand side of the dialog for each service you select, or at the very least you can Google the service and get a more layman description. I personally advise using it, strongly. There are so many processes running by default you might not need. Like Printer Spooler? I don't have a printer, don't use one, and that service is always running on system bootup, turn it off. (just one of MANY examples).

I'll edit with updated descriptions, I was aiming for speed in making it since I saw there was a need for it so any small errors please forgive.

Your advice regarding usb is out of date. By your own admission, you were using a pc that was woefully underpowered and really old. If you meet the minimum system requirements to play STO, having USB devices will have no effect on fps, period.

Regarding sound, see previous paragraph.

I would still post a warning about using Viper's guide, to be very careful when doing so and only if you are comfortable with making system changes that can seriously effect your pc. ALL pc's are different, and yes the basic OS install does install various processes you may not need. HOWEVER, many box pc stores like Dell, Hewett-Packard, Sony, etc install alot of junk, but that junk is actually needed to operate, and removing or altering could have negative impacts on your system. i have been in the pc diagnosis and repair business for over 15 years and have seen this many times. A little warning would go along way.

The command for an fps counter is:

/showfps 1

Thanks

Now for some 'fiddling' with the eye candy settings

Awesome thanks

NICE! +rep if that was even possible

Cryptic devs and/or community reps, this thread should really be stickied.

Solid suggestions for those struggling with producing a good framerate.

I'd like to make some recommendations and comments about a few of these options, specifically...

This should actually always be on auto unless the client isn't determining their aspect ratio properly. It should not affect performance (or have a nominal impact). For example, if a person is running a 16:9 monitor but sets it to 4:3, things are going to look skewed, but it's not going to affect performance.

Vertical sync is still a good thing to leave enabled. Why? Even if they're getting less frames per second on average for gameplay, they're going to get much, much more on a static loading screen that's still rendering via DirectX. Having vertical sync enabled should reduce GPU load (and thus temps) while people are stuck on loading screens, and that's always a good thing. I don't think there's any performance hit if you leave it on even if you GPU isn't getting close to your monitor refresh rate during normal gameplay conditions.

Yup, I agree, off for people struggling with performance. However, I believe this has to do with how the environment is rendered when you're either 1.) viewing a pool or water and seeing what's under it, or 2.) when viewing the environment while under water. Not sure which, as I haven't tested it. But it does serve a purpose and I agree they can leave it off to help performance.

It depends. This is a performance enhancer if the user has a good deal of video memory. For example, they might have a cruddy, weak video card, but with 1GB of video memory. I'd say if a user has over 512MB of video memory (ie: 640MB and up), they should enable this for better performance. If they have less (ie: 320MB, 256 MB, etc.), they should disable to improve performance. 512MB is probably close to where it evens out, but that's just an educated guess from testing STO with the various PCs and video cards I have.

Nice job on the write up!