[aoaaron]

Okay, my windows system is up and running.

I THINK I have DDS art enabled now... not sure.
its running a small system (ER1401)... streaming from an unraid server via a powerplug or sometimes wifi if i move it to another room.

the most i play is 720p blueray rips using hardware acceleration.


Are there any tips from seasoned windows users to:
a) make menus more smoother and load the background images quicker (theres a 1sec delay ATM). same with fanart really..
b) make video playback a bit better?

right now i've just gone with the driver for nvidia window gave me.
ive disabled aero...
im streaming from my unraid server using windows SMB shares.

i heard some suggestions:
1) install combined community codec pack - is this a good thing to do? I do watch anime or atleast plan to on the machine.. will this really help xbmc? someone told me of divx hardware accel
2) disable UAC
3) Disable Windows Search Indexing.

[jhsrennie]

right now i've just gone with the driver for nvidia window gave me.

Use the driver from the manufacturer's web site or from the NVIDIA web site. The one included with Windows is far from ideal.

1) install combined community codec pack - is this a good thing to do?

XBMC doesn't use external codecs, so installing them won't help.

2) disable UAC
3) Disable Windows Search Indexing.

Disabling UAC won't make any difference. Disabling search is probably a good thing as it stops Windows rattling the disks when you're trying to play a video. However it's unlikely to make a huge difference. Installing the correct video driver should be your first step.

JR