computer slowdown

[topazworm]

I have a amd athlon 1100mhz comp, 256 mb, 40 gig hard drive. 64 mb hercules graphics card and soundblaster audigy soundcard. Heres my question. with all this gear why when i play jedi knight 2 or in fact most games (even though there min requirement is about 450mhz about 64mb ram) there such slowdown. for example when i first install jedi knight 2 in 800x600 res and 32 bit colour it moove pretty fast and slick but it seems that after a few games and days pass it slows. and when i decrease all settings to rock bottom like texture depth and texture quality etc the slowdown is that of a pentium 1 66mhz. a discrace for all this money im blowing on hardwhere. so my questions..1 why is this slowdown? 2. can it be solved without upgrading and 3 if i upgrade wats the main thing to upgrade which will give me the best boost. ps im running windows xp. thanks

 

[floydt]

Have you deleted temp files and run defrag lately. Your drive is probably full of past games as temp files and needs to be purged of old stuff. Then defrag for fast loading of the files you need.

 

[topazworm]

i have ran defrag and cleared temp files. its very frustrating.

 

[dumdum]

have you tried running "Cacheman" from outertech.com ?

You may have your swapfile set wrong or some sort of mem leak thats eating up all your resources. We are always looking for new members at:

http://forums.jlrforum.net

Please come join our community too.

 

[jmatt]

http://www.tweakxp.com/default.asp

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q312/3/69.ASP

http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20011204S0009

http://www.extremetech.com/article/0,3396,s%3D1027%26a%3D19543,00.asp?kc=ETEL10112TTX1K0000475

http://www.winxpfix.com/winxpfix/index.htm

http://members.aol.com/axcel216/

http://thor.prohosting.com/~1cls/windows_xp.htm

http://www.winxptop.com/winxptop/

http://www.tipsdr.com/index.html

http://www.tweak3d.net/tweak/winxp/

http://www.wxperience.com/tips.php

 

[Pyramus]

Have you tried playing with sound disabled? I've heard so many reports of people having problems with the Audigy card. Try uninstalling the sound card and see if you still have the same prob.

 

[fritchdog]

When you notice the slow down press ctrl+alt+del to view task manager Go to the performace tab. You can view how much ram and cpu is being used at that moment. If your ram is high you might have too many programs runnig. Go to the run command and type "msconfig". This will bring up the "system configuration utility". Go to the startup tab and see how many programs you have running at startup. These are programs that are taking up resources all the time until they are completely closed. Deselect the box to assure that they will not start every time you boot. You will typically see these programs located on the bottom right of your screen, next to the clock. When you boot again a message will display, "you have chosen a selective startup. Do you want this...bla bla bla. Yes or no" choose yes and check the box to not display this message again. And it won't. I believe the reason for that warning is MS's way of curbing people from getting rid of that annoying messenger service they have preloaded on XP.

It is also possible that you installed a program/game that is not releasing in memory. I believe that is known as a memory leak. To stop it simple found out what program is causing this and uninstall it. I would suspect older games to be culperit first.

Also, your swap file. Make sure it is at least 1.5 X your RAM.