games lagging

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jimar

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Hey all, just something which has been bothering me a bit over the past few weeks -

Whenever I'm playing a game, it would run smoothly for a few seconds, and then video lags pretty badly for a few more seconds, and then go back to being normal again and so on. Sound and everything else seems fine. This happens on every game I've tried - Age of Kings, Warcraft3, FIFA etc, and even DX-Ball (a clone of the old classic 'breakout'). I'm guessing that this might also happen when I'm running office apps or internet, just that it's only noticible when playing games.

Specs:
Dell Inspiron 5150 notebook
3Ghz Pentium 4
512MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 32 MB
Windows XP SP2

I've tried getting the latest drivers, virus and spyware scanned, but to no avail. Could it be a problem with the hardware? Sound familiar to anyone? Any help greatly appreciated, cheers.
 
jimar,

A simple effective solution. Take your Graphics card out of the slot, dust it and put the card back in. Now it should be good to go. (mostly!) I had this problem recently , that my game exits after playing 4 min approx of any game and i cleaned my slot and card, well it worked fine !

And, install the latest direct-x version [ I suppose it is 9.0 C ]
 
Its kinda hard to take your card out when its on a Dell notebook...

Lag = bad/slow internet/network connection.

Graphical slow-down is called "S***ty FPS (Frames Per Second)"

Cleaning your card only gets the dust out, and therefore maybe reducing an overheating problem, but It would probably totaly mess up if it overheated, than just kick you out of your game.

It may not be your card, too. I had an old machine that would freeze for a half second, every 10 seconds playing QuakeII, and it ended up being the hard drive.

Anyways, Having only a 32mb 5200 is pretty low, yet sadly better than the Intel brand graphics crap they throw in there all the time.
...but that shouldn't effect office apps. I'll think about it today and see what I can think of.
 
Thanks for the help guys. I'm not too sure about taking out my card, don't wanna screw something else up in the process, but I'll keep that in mind if all else fails ;)

A 32MB GeforceFX 5200 is kinda tame, but i mean, the games I play aren't exactly cutting edge 3D either (what 'hardcore' gamer would want a notebook anyway?).

The thing that bothers me is that everything worked fine when the computer was new, and this lag... i mean, sh*ty FPS only started happening recently.

Thanks again, cheers.
 
jimar said:

The thing that bothers me is that everything worked fine when the computer was new, and this lag... i mean, sh*ty FPS only started happening recently.


If that is the case it is not the GPU at all although your GPU is very weak.

Try scanning for spyware and adware using other programs. Maybe the ones you used did not pick it up. Run virus scan. Use Panda's free online scan. Then defrag your PC and see how it runs then.

Open up your task manager is your CPU always high? That could be an indication of a background program working without your knowledge. Like keyloggers.
 
You could run msconfig to see what programs are starting up when windows boots up. You can disable those that are unnecessary to save system resources. It sounds like you might have too many things running at once.
 
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