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Jan 6th, 2005
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System Slowing Down

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Don't know what the heck is going on. Whenever I try to play a game, the system intermittently slows down, and my game along with it. It doesn't matter whether the game is recent or 10 years old. I attempted to play StarCraft earlier, whose only requirements are a Pentium 90 MHz processor and 16 MB of RAM, and the problem still occured.

I'm running Windows XP with a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM. I have a NVidia GeForce 2 graphics card, which should be more than enough for what I need. I've got a 70 GB hard drive, with 40 GB free space.

I ran Lavasoft Ad-Aware and Spy Bot Search & Destroy to get rid of all spyware/adware, cleaned out the registry, ran Norton Anti-Virus, which found nothing, and shut down all unnecessary system processes. Nothing seems to help.

I'm clean out of ideas here, and I've been racking my brain for days. Any suggestions?

---Tony
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phobetor is offline Offline
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since Jan 2005
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Jan 6th, 2005
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Re: System Slowing Down

Its a long-shot but Disk Defrag? often on a cluttered disk a 20% performance increase in harware intensive games can be found! Other than that I would say increasing the RAM for the system but the problem is happening for all of your games - unless you have something eating the RAM away without you realising....
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1o0oBhP is offline Offline
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Jan 7th, 2005
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Re: System Slowing Down

Yeah, I tried a Defrag too. 512 MB should be more than enough for what I'm doing.

All I can think of is that there is some rogue program doing stuff that I can't find in Task Manager.
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phobetor is offline Offline
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Jan 7th, 2005
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Re: System Slowing Down

I had that problem recently, and started looking real hard at the processes running in the background. It turns out that there were either duplicate processes (that were rogue operations -- with a one character difference in the name of the file) or rogue processes that were really official looking. I guess I should have known earlier.

Was suprised that alot of my spyware / antivirus software caught almost none of them. hmmm.....

Yeah...but check that out. Might help a little (It did for one of my PCs)

The other is still chugging at the Sims 2....so my guess is as good as yours.
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pcpalct is offline Offline
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Jan 7th, 2005
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Re: System Slowing Down

do you have your xp cd? make a new partition (a small one) and svae all your important stuff on it, then reformat your pc, if you have very little to save use a cd to burn on
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rcrevolution is offline Offline
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Jan 8th, 2005
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Re: System Slowing Down

Success! It seemed to be some sort of cooling malfunction. My fans were choked up with dust. All is now well.
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phobetor is offline Offline
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Jan 8th, 2005
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Re: System Slowing Down

well done! never saw that coming! you could always get some bigger fans, maybe with an LED - you could grind a 120mm fan hole or even then get some more fans! good airflow will help to reduce the dust - and keep it cooler
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