having yet more computer problems can you guys save the day yet again?
 

I swear I could keep this forum active with all my problems alone.

Ok so heres the situation. I play World of Warcraft and I noticed somtimes when I log on the game is very choppy. The degree of choppiness varies from not so bad to making the game unplayable. I just noticed that when it gets very choppy in the game it will also be choppy aol IM chat window. What I mean is I'll be typing to someone and normally as I type I can see the letter I type in the chat box, however when the computer is choppy I'll type the words in and it goes fine for most of it, but then all of a sudden I stop seeing what I type in for a second and then all of a sudden everything I typed during the choppy moment is then in the chat box(I hope I'm clear on what I mean by this).

Now this doesn't happen all the time, I would say most of the time everything runs fine. However it happens often enough that I want it fixed. Somtimes it clears itself up on its own if I wait it out, other times it seems like it will never stop. Restarting doesn't always resolve this like it did on my old computer (it only happend in games on my old computer)

System specs are:
Athlon 64 3500+ 2.21 ghz, 2.00 gb of ram
Dual nVidia 6600gt
Seagate SATA hard drive, not sure the exact specs but I can look it up if needed (that reminds me, when I installed windows it asked me to limit the space of my hard drive from 250 gigs to 150 gigs to allow windows to install properly, anyone know how to change this back like windows said I could?)

Any further questions you may have let me know. I'm not great with computers so bare this in mind, I may need to know how to figure your question out.

Oh and finally I have all the latest drivers installed to the best of my knowledge. I've checked screen refresh rates and they seem to be correct, I've tried different settings for it and it doesn't fix it.

Well it would sound like a RAM/Video memory problem
After seeing your specs, I doubt it's hardware
The only thing I can think of
is something being a resource hog.
Shutdown unnecessary running tasks.
look at your tasks to see if
anything is useing large amounts of RAM

That's not what screen refresh rate is for.

Have you tried to play WOW without the network cable connected? Run some other application that experienced this problem, this time, don't connect to the network. Play singleplayer or something.

well I can't play WoW without being connected, I can try half life 2 though, I'll do that right now



Ok in single player mode I got the choppiness. And alpha, AIM was taking up the most meory space, there were some things that I didn't know what they were taking up memory, but that could just be somthing necessary to running the computer that I don't know much about. I am afterall a newb when it comes to computers.

A friend of mine suggested it might be a bad installation of video drivers so I'm going to try and reinstall them again. I'll report back if it works.

with SLI 6600s and 2 gig ram(god damn man how did you get a sweet computer with no knowledge of them..) it's certainly not a hardware issue.

Have you tried restarting right before you play? Battlefield 2 does this to me, simply because it does not properly shut down. If a game uses a lot of memory, and the programmers forget to delete just one of those handles when the game exits, it keeps your RAM locked up until the next reboot. Try rebooting right before you play, and see how that goes. If you notice the laggyness, check out your % used of RAM (ctrl / alt / delete) and report back..

I would seriously look into any kind of spyware that could be clogging up the dataflow and making the computer run slow or laggy like this. You mentioned that it did this before and rebooting does not help like it did on another system you had. Could it be that you had something then, and installed the same thing on this new computer that is a resource hog. Although you do have some very nice hardware there is always the possibility that it could still be a hardware issue, if some ram or the the video card were to be bad, along with you trying new drivers, I would try a different video card if you have it and see how that works, or your card in another machine, also try running with one stick of ram, then the other see if it could be either of the two of them bad as well....

The above is very
http://img326.imageshack.us/img326/7...dadvice6pb.gif

If it's okay most of the time I wouldn't worry much about video drivers.

You mentioned HL2 was choppy in single player, but I couldn't tell if that meant you had disconnected the LAN cable. Following that direction, is this a stand-alone system at home or one of several systems? Any chance you're sharing files or other services? Any chance you have connections open to other systems?

Spank you, Spank you very much.

not wanting to hijack the thread, can you give us a bit more info after trying some of everyones suggestions above. Also something else I just thought of, and this is pure speculation, is you gfx a brand name card such as one Built By XXX vs just powered by?

Example, ATI makes cards which you buy in retail boxes that have ATI and the ATI brand name all over them, then they also make the chip itself which they then sell to other companies who make their own boards and cards. So while you may have an Nvidia chipset was it the cheapest possible one or one that was actually made by a larger well known company? Not saying that this is at all a problem as I do not know one single person who will not look for a value, but I personally tend to stay away from unknown hardware companies and go with something a bit more well known or with a better reputation....

Just out of the curiousity, when did this problem started? Try to remember back as to what you have changed that may have cause the issue

ugh ok thread update time, I'm going to try and answer questions in this thread to the best of my ability. Reinstalling the drivers didn't work. Today I was playing WoW and it was running fine, then bam the choppiness kicked in out of nowhere.

Jinnkai yes I've tried restarting and then playing WoW as the first thing I do and the problem still occurs. As for memory usage I don't really understand this stuff in ctrl alt delete but it says the following:

Physical memory:
Total 2096616
available 1093000
system cache 13131000

Kernel Memory:
Total 106512
paged 87864
nonpaged 18608

Those numbers are just a guessed average as some of them are constantly changing. Under the process tab nothing seems to be using an excessive amount of memory, WoW uses the most right now and somthing called mcsheld.exe uses the next most amount.

Montana I suppose it could be spyware. I run microsoft antispyware every night, and adaware once or twice a week. If I do the memory thing how do I know if the stick is bad or not? Right now I have 4 sticks which equal 2 gigs of memory, these 4 sticks take up all the slots for memory on my mobo. As for swapping video cards the only good cards in this house are my 2 6600gt cards. I suppose I could switch to non sli and try them both out one at a time, this would be a pain in the ass however.

Crynel later I'll try and disconnect from the network and run half life to see if the problem persists, but I don't feel like doing that right now. And we have a computer directly connected to the cable modem. The modem however is connected to a b router first, then from that router to the downstairs computer. The b router is also connected to a g router. This G router is what I use for a wireless network that we have. We have a lap top that runs wirelessly off the b router. A friend of mine though it was the internet connection causing this but I just don't think thats the case. It doesn't feel laggy it just feels choppy. Whether or not files are being shared I don't know, I don't think so though.

As for Montanas next question, the cards I have are made by eVGA.

As for when the problem started I can't pinpoint exactly. This computer is pretty new, its been connected to the internet for about 3 weeks I'd say. The first week of playing was fine, no problems at all. After that first week I started to have lag issues, and somwhere in that time the choppiness started. The lag was from me being connected to a b router because switching to the g router resolved my massive latency issues.

One last note that I noticed today. Alt tabbing out of the game makes the choppiness far more severe somtimes.