severe slowdown after 15 seconds

[diablos220]

Hi I just reinstalled my computer with xp sp1.(long story) but basically im trying to run battlefield 1942. Everything is working fine, but when i start up battlefield, the game works good for about 15 seconds and then it chugs down to nothing. Even if i am quick enough to go through the menus and start a game, the game itself will run ( at lowest settings for everything) and i might even get a shot or two in, but then the framerate drops to about one frame per 2 seconds. My hardware is pretty antique. I have an 800mhz athlon (slot a) k7m board, 64mb radeon 7000 vid card, 384mb RAM. Ive got more memory and an overclocked 750 as well but i want to see if itll run on the bare minimum, and so far it seems like the computer CAN run BF but it just bogs down. I will be upgrading soon but I was wondering what could cause my problem. Thanks for any help you guys can give, im still learning!

 

[Mr. Switch]

just reinstalled my computer with xp sp1.(long story)

that tells me that something went wrong with the install, so reformat again and install sp 1 and 2, and try bf1942 again.

 

[diablos220]

assuming the o/s is alright, is there anything else that could cause this problem? Other programs run fine, and gta2 doesnt slow down. I know that doesnt use as much juice but is it normal that a game would run fine for a bit then just slow down, it stil works but really slow.

 

[Static_11]

hmm... isnt BF1942 an online game?? maybe you just have a crappy connection?
other than that i say as said above and reformat.. or maybe even just uninstall and reinstall BF

 

[diablos220]

BF has online play but its got a campaign mode as well. I wont be playing it online because ive got dial up ill try reformatting and see if that helps.

 

[hikaricloud]

if you are using a 64mb card, that might be the problem...doesnt BF have a min requirement of 64mb? that might be your problem.

just because it's the minimal requirement, doesnt mean it will run good. hell, microsoft says the min requirement for XP is 64mb RAM...with 128mb recoomended. and i'll tell you, 128 is horridly slow with XP, and i have never seen 64mb work. so if you have a higher vid card, use that.

 

[diablos220]

The minimum is 32mb, I had a 16mb card originally and BF wouldnt even initialize. So i bought my radeon 7000. I couldnt find a 2x agp compatable card with higher ram. My board is so old and i dont want to spend a lot of money on it because it will be my back up comp when i upgrade. Im sure im just barely on the threshold of running BF. I added 128mb of ram (512 total) and that helped my slowdown a bit, now it takes about 20 minutes before my computer slows to a crawl. I put my 750 cpu o/c to 900 and am running a program to test stability. I dont know what else to try. I dont have another video card and i dont want to buy more vintage parts... Does anyone know of some benchmark programs or demos i can use to test my comps speed and stability? im using the torture test of prime95 and i havent gotten any errors but I dont know if its a good test or not.

 

[vaderpro]

Sry but looking at your specs i dont believe you can play Bf2....

Esp: recommended is 1gb ram and min is 512mb. That video card is not supported.

http://www.planetbattlefield.com/bf2/game/system/

Guys with 6600gts have problems playin that game.

 

[diablos220]

im playing Battlefield 1942 Anthology. its bf 1 with road to rome expansion and secret weapons.
Recommended:

500mhz or faster
128mb+ RAM
8x+ cd rom
2.8gb+ HD
DirectX 8.1 compatable video card (32mb or more)

my system:

900mhz
512mb RAM
52x cd writer
2x 80 gig ata HDs
DirectX 9.1c
Radeon 7000 64mb

I should be ok right?

 

[iceware]

YouÂ’ve probably got your video settings in BF 1942 set too high. The default settings after installation are set to high quality and 800 x 600 resolution. By the specifications of your computer that you posted I would recommend the video settings set to low quality. I remember back in the day when I first got BF 1942. My AMD Duron 1.2GHz with 256MB DDR RAM and a GeForce 2 MX video card and I had to play it at 800x600 in low quality settings. If changing the quality settings to low still gives you speed problems then try 640 x 480 resolution. Another thing is what sort of processor do you have ?
I sure hope itÂ’s an Athlon or a Pentium III not a Celeron. If it is a Celeron or worse yet one of those VIA chips then that would probably be your problem.

Anyways good luck.