Ladies and Gentlemen....I present to you... Game booster

Gave GameBooster a try last night. Found it worked really nicely with DF. Also, its free.

"Designed to help optimize your PC for smoother, more responsive game play in the latest PC games with the touch of a button, Game Booster helps achieve the performance edge previously only available to highly technical enthusiasts.

It works by defragmenting game directories, temporarily shutting down background processes, cleaning RAM, and intensifying processor performance. That means you can keep all the features of operating systems ready for when you need them, but turn them off when you are ready to get down to serious business – gaming."

Ran a test fort last night, even after the second wave of migrants I was running a solid 100fps. Lowest I saw it dip to was around 70, but only very briefly and not often at all.

Edit: lol, so many people thinking its spam when its just a usefull app.

Lemme summarise it again.... What this does mainly is disable all the background processes that arent needed. Freeing up resources for gaming.

When I run it on my work pc, it shuts down the following: Application Layer Gateway Service, Automatic updates, Cryptographic Services, Fast User switching Compatibility, Logical Disk Manager, TCP/IP Netbios Helper, Network Location Awareness, Print Spooler, Protected Storage, Secondary logon, Server, SSDP Discovery service, System event notification, Task Schedular, Windows time.

If you cant see how disabling all of that helps your OS run smoother, then yeah, you dont need this.