Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Jace]

Alright, I have been having problems for a while with games on my computer. I thought maybe it was graphics, or just through steam or just online, but I get this lag out of nowhere every 2-10 minutes when playing games. It lasts for 30-90 seconds and it really is quite annoying. I have tried updating the graphics drivers, changing the CPU affinity, closing extra programs, running virus/malware scans, lowering the graphics in game, updating my computer to service pack 2 (I thought it had fixed the problem last night, but it returned today). Generally, the longer I play the game, the more frequency the lag comes. I am at a loss for what to do next, but the few hundred dollars worth of games that I can't play is really frustrating, honestly.

Operating System: Windows Vista™ Home Premium (6.0, Build 6002) Service Pack 2 (6002.vistasp2_gdr.100218-0019)
           Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: eMachines
       System Model: ET1641-02w
               BIOS: Default System BIOS
          Processor: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU        E1400  @ 2.00GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.0GHz
             Memory: 3326MB RAM
          Page File: 1423MB used, 5447MB available
        Windows Dir: C:\Windows
    DirectX Version: DirectX 10
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
     DxDiag Version: 6.00.6001.18000 32bit Unicode

[Jimor]

Not that I know much about this, but my first suspicion is the virus scanner, particularly if it's Norton or McAfee. Might try it with any active scanning turned off or even shut down entirely to test. (An earlier version of McAfee I had would freeze the mouse pointer for a quarter sec every 2 seconds, talk about maddening.)

The increasing badness of the problem also suggests some kind of memory garbage collection. The fact that you turned off extra programs tends to discount this, though. Might try running a CPU meter of some kind to see if any programs keep spiking, or if it's the game itself. That it hits all your games makes me think it's a general memory management problem, though.

Probably not much in the above you haven't thought of already, but hope it helps.

[evilbobthebob]

As Jimor said, if the lag increases as play time increases, it sounds like a memory problem. Vista has a built in memory test in Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Memory Diagnostics Tool. That'll tell you if one of your RAM sticks has died. It is possible that one of them has broken a little, causing the computer to use the slow paging file on memory intensive applications. The other thing I would suggest is backing up all your important stuff and doing a clean reinstall of Vista. I did that recently for my laptop; it really helped, and my laptop has almost the same specs as your PC. You could also look up the recommended services to disable on Vista; there are a number of memory related ones that may be affecting performance. Other than that, it could well be an overheating issue. Take a low power vaccuum cleaner, or ideally an implement designed for cleaning PCs, carefully open up your PC case and remove any dust you find. Carefully. Unless of course you already do that.

[Jace]

I had my task manager open while I was playing a game just now, and found that while I wasn't using all of the RAM I have available, my CPU was at 100% during the lag, which was coming quite frequently this time.

[snalin]

Did you see what program was using all of the cpu? On xp, at least, svchost can bug and cause massive CPU drain. I've had that happen to me. I think I've also bumped into some kind of problem where your virus program checks itself and gets really confused about that and ends up draining everything.

You could also switch to 7, see if that helps. I had a low end laptop (1 GB ram) running Vista, and before I even started running programs, the memory drain was always over 70%.