consistantly terrible

[ornj]

Now I'll never claim to know much about hardware, but for some reason I am consistantly recieving piss poor performance in everything I do. Every game I play runs like crap (UT2004, Doom 3, Knights of the Old Republic, games like these) I have all the settings turned down to normal or below and I still get chop. My system isn't the best but it doesnt even seem to perform at the rate that similar systems claim to be able to handle.

My system:

AMD Athlon XP 2400+ with a thermaltake volcano (internal clock: 2004.45 mhz, system clock 133.64, system bus 267.27 mhz ddr, multiplier: 15.0)
1 gb of ddr ram
Asus Radeon 9600xt
Soundblaster Audigy 2 zs pro
Windows is on it's own 10 gb partition
software being run off the remaining 110 gb (30 gb available)
I have all the latest drivers for my hardware, I have fans in my case all over the place.

I don't see any reason why I shouldn't be performing well but then again I don't know much about this stuff. Can someone see an issue and maybe spoon feed me an answer? Thanks.

 

[Rich9710]

Can you tell us what kind of RAM it is? Is it PC3200/2700/2400/2100? It might be your RAM isn't up to snuff, but that's just a theory. Given your system you should at least be able to get good framerates on KOTOR and UT2004. And what resolution are you running your games at. Might be too high...

Need more info...

 

[ornj]

Kingston DDR400 PC3200

I run UT2004 at 800x600

 

[Buckus]

Check for spyware, make sure you have the latest video drivers. That's my suggestion of the top of my head. Also check to make sure you have the latest system drivers.

 

[NeoNemesis]

How old is this system? I would suggest that if its over a year you reformat it and it should work almost as good as new. Also, try updating drivers and whatnot, especially for your video card if you have not been doing so regularly.

 

[MemoryInAGarden]

Sounds like adware/spyware/viruses in the background

 

[Klade]

Ugh reformatting should be a last ditch option in my book. What version of windows are you running? If its not XP then you might have tmp files floating around in your system.

I would also run defrag if you haven't done so in the past month. If you do that often then don't worry about it, but most of the time peoples hd's just are really badly fragmented.

Oh and what virus scanner are you running? Some of the older versions of Mcafee (sp) have a setting that will scan every file that is used every time that its used. This can make running games a bit of a chore for your poor processor and hd ;-). So try turning off your virus scanner when you run a game and see if that helps speed things up.

 

[EnderW]

try a fresh install, then make sure you have the lastest drivers/bios for everything, then run prime 95 and memtest for about 12 hours each for stress testing

 

[ornj]

I have the latest drivers for everything, even though the latest catalyst drivers cause KOTOR to crash :-/

I just defragged the other day, I ran spybot

I am using Windows XP, everything is updated, I am really annal about keeping everything up to date. I built the computer after christmas.

 

[ornj]

my anti virus software is turned off too. I manually tell it to scan every now and then.

I think I might just have some hardware that is crapping out on me, with my luck that is probably the answer.

 

[Klade]

If you are having a hardware issue and not a software issue then my first thought would be your harddrive. After that maybe your ram.. or even your mobo. If its possible to swap these parts out without buying new (ie you have spar lieing around or in other computers you could use) then try doing that.

After that things get expensive.

 

[Carnival Forces]

Sounds like adware/spyware/viruses in the background

same here, see the Unofficial Official Tweak Guide thread at the top of this forum? read it, it should fix your problems.
gl/hf

 

[Xeese]

my anti virus software is turned off too. I manually tell it to scan every now and then.

I think I might just have some hardware that is crapping out on me, with my luck that is probably the answer.

Running a desktop firewall? "I don't use condoms but go to the clinic to get checked every so often"

 

[Stiletto One]

Running a desktop firewall? "I don't use condoms but go to the clinic to get checked every so often"

My thoughts exactly. Any normal real-time scanner doesn't use enough resources to make anything else unusable, turn it back on.

Anyhow, I'll second scanning for adware and whatnot, but also make sure your virus definitions are up to date and then run a deep scan. Or hit up Trend Micro and get Sysclean and the latest virus pattern file and run a deep scan using that.

 

[The_Tecknishen]

I had a similar problem a couple years ago. Everything was running soooooo slow. Anyway, it turned out my hard drive was going bad. So try a new hard drive maybe and see if that helps any.

 

[Mav451]

i don't think its the hard drive...I recently had some driver problems.

I tried to use the Cat 4.7's--ended up destroying any hopes of overclocking past stock and my 3dmark scores plummeted from 11.3k to 9k. Yes, it was that bad. You can only imagine how bad it hurt in D3D games like UT2k4.

I tried to just install the 4.3's back over the 4.7's, but it didn't improve. Turns out the shitty 4.7's were still lurking around, so I did a full uninstall of the drivers (i.e. restarting and booting into windows at a god forsaken 640 x 480 until the 4.3's were reinstalled).

 

[EnderW]

reformat

 

[Matt Woller]

Ugh reformatting should be a last ditch option in my book.

Not really. I find myself formatting every 2-3 months, as that keeps Windows somewhat alive. When you use your system enough, it dies, no matter what version of Windows you're using. =P

In other words... BOMBS AWAY!!!

 

[EnderW]

Ugh reformatting should be a last ditch option in my book.

Reformatting isn't a big deal if you have have your os/apps on a different partition then your other files and you have a ghost image of your os/main apps that you can restore from