Windows XP user accounts

netdumdum

Hi,

I am setting up a new user account in windows xp for playing games, so I can tweak all the settings etc for max performance.

Is it possible not to have the anti virus installed on that profile so it wont interfere with games?

smcicr

should be - you may have to do some digging on how or perhaps just uninstall and reinstall the AV software after you've created the second profile. if you have multiple profiles created then you will usually get prompted on installing new apps as to whether you want them available just to you or to all profiles / users. not sure how that will work the other way as it were with you having installed the app before creating the other profile. simplest thing to do i guess is create another profile and see what you get prompted with - it might ask you if you want to make the apps already installed available?

John_Gray

I'm afraid I disagree with smcicr.

AntiVirus software is supposed to protect the entire machine at all times, which is why the "on-access antivirus scanner" is usually implemented via Services which get started very shortly after power-on, to check files which are about to be executed or downloaded, etc.

Perhaps the program you can ask to scan the entire PC's hard disk might be implementable by userid/profile? But that is a once-a-day/once-a-week activity.

I'm also fairly sceptical about the efficacy of "XP Tweaks", but the most authoritative source could be TweakGuides Tweaking Companion - a 170 page PDF...

John

netdumdum

Ok, thanks for your advice John, think I will probably just disable anti virus in task manager.

Chippy_Minton

As John says, most anti-virus software is run as Windows services which are set to start automatically at system startup. If that's the case with your own AV, I would do the following to disable AV just for your games user, whilst having it enabled by default for your normal user(s).

Log in to your games user account. Click Start - Run, type in services.msc and click OK. Using Notepad, create a DOS batch command file called something like stop_av.bat containing net stop "service name" commands one per line to stop each of your AV services. The service name is the name shown in the Services display. For example:

net stop "My Anti-virus Agent"
net stop "My Anti-virus Scanner"

Save stop_av.bat in C:\Documents and Settings\<myGamesUsername>\Start Menu\Programs\Startup. You can open this directory by clicking Start - All Programs - right-click on Startup - click Explore. Next, log out of your games user account and back in again and check that the AV services have a blank status (i.e. not Started).

This technique can be used for other services which don't need to be running for your games user. See Copy of Black Viper Windows XP Services for other services you can safely disable or set to manual.

PS - Good find John, that looks like a useful guide.

John_Gray

There's a lengthy thread which decries the use of "XP Tweaks" of the Black Viper variety here. You need to be dedicated to work through it all...!

John