So, before I go reformat...

...I'd like to see if anyone has any ideas on what could be my problem here.

For about a week now playing games (like Left 4 Dead, Audiosurf, World of Warcraft) has gotten a little annoying. Every minute or so for about 15-20 seconds my games go from playing fine and smooth to choking on a hairball. I've tried fullscreen, widescreen, whatever and the only games that seem to not be affected are Quake 3 (which, coincidentally, I installed a week or so ago), Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 and MVP Baseball 2005. I could play PES09 and Q3 in windows just out of curiousity but there doesn't appear to be a point.

To see if I could diagnose the problem, Audiosurf actually works best because I can leave it in free play mode, windowed, and have Task Manager open. Surprisingly, nothing seems to be doing ANYTHING much other than Audiosurf and the omnipresent System Idle Process. I am at a loss, mostly.

I installed fresh, new video drivers from nVidia to see if that would fix it? Nope. Maybe a defrag, but that's unlikely since I've got my drives defragging when they hit 50% fragmentation and they haven't hit 5% since the last time I did it. My only other options are to flash the BIOS (which I haven't got my heart set on, really). check to see if there's any dust/damage on my video card (since the issue seems video-related), and, of course, reformat. I'm hoping it doesn't come to that, since it feels like I've done it already within the last 6-12 months, but I'd rather have it be a software issue than a hardware one (like I need an excuse to go out and get a new video card/mobo-proc combo).

So, before I jump off a cliff, anyone got any ideas?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Well it's never a terrible thing to have a fresh start every few months but if you want to go for the long term there are a few things you can do.

1) Realize that anything that is on your Desktop, My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, etc. (your entire user profile basically) is loaded for quick access in your memory. Start storing too much shit on your Desktop and you'll start seeing a performance drop. Microsoft does this because it's convenient to have this shit load quick for the average consumer who doesn't really care that much about overall performance. Solution: Don't use My Documents or anything in your profile as much as possible. Instead make a folder on your C drive or even an extra drive on your computer if you have one and throw all your shit in there that you'd normally store in My Documents or files you pile on top of your Desktop. Then make a shortcut of that folder and place it on your Desktop. Have anything you save to your Desktop? Throw that crap in the shortcut and voila it's out of sight out of mind.

2) Download CCleaner and clean the fuck out of your machine. Might as well let it clean your registry while your at it.

3) Get rid of any of those fucking retarded Internet Tool Bars you may have installed. Fuck that shit. Uninstall it. If it keeps popping up then get something like Malwarebytes Antimalware, run it, and get rid of that shit.

4) Defrag your harddrive. My recommendation is PerfectDisk. It has a nice option to do offline defragging of your pagefile and other stuff that you can't get at while your operating system is running.

5) Make sure you have a decent amount of space available on your system drive. If that drive gets full then you'll start seeing all kind of quirks popping up. Keep your system healthy, yo.


If all that fails you then yeah I guess you might as well back up your files and start from scratch. It's not a bad thing. Clean is good. Just keep these things in mind next go around.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

You should also try rolling back your video card's drivers by about a year to see if that helps. I've found sometimes new "stable" drivers cause a small percentage of systems to go to absolute shit, so you need to stick with older versions until they work those kinks out.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Thanks for the input guys. Just a couple counterpoints.

AcerBandit
My desktop is pretty clean to begin with (I only have a Game folder, the Recycle Bin, and another folder for all the music from the Video Game Music Quiz).

I don't have any Internet search bars, just the add-ons for AdBlock Plus, StumbleUpon and WeatherPlus, but I don't see why that would ruin my gaming, particularly if Firefox isn't open.

My main HD is actually half-full (it's a 500GB SATA) which surprised me. Most of that is in my music collection, which IS in my My Documents > My Music folder (thanks iTunes). All my pictures are in My Documents too. I don't mind moving all my music and pictures out of there if you think it's a good idea. Question though: my Games folder on my desktop isn't a shortcut to a folder on my main drive, it's a folder full of shortcuts. Should I change it to how you explained it, or is it fine the way it is?

I hadn't tried CCleaner in the past but I'll give it a go. I'll also defrag while I'm at work.

RacinReaver
Worse comes to worst, I'll try your suggestion, but since the drivers I had been using were working for several months (probably since I last reformatted), I think I'll just roll back to the previous build before I go back a year.

Most amazing jew boots

Sorry, this is slightly off-topic but seemed the best place to drop this, seeing as how you're discussing computer speeds:

YouTube Video

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by The Dopefish

My main HD is actually half-full (it's a 500GB SATA) which surprised me.

It's always good to keep at least around 30 to 15 percent of your system drive free. Thing is if you go too low then your harddrive has a harder time keeping healthy even if you defrag. Btw, go torrent the shit out of PerfectDisk. Its offline defragging and smartplacement technology are excellent.

Originally Posted by The Dopefish

Most of that is in my music collection, which IS in my My Documents > My Music folder (thanks iTunes). All my pictures are in My Documents too. I don't mind moving all my music and pictures out of there if you think it's a good idea.

Yeah, go ahead and do it. And even if it doesn't manage to affect overall performance it should at the least get your machine to boot and get raring to go a bit quicker since the memory dedicated to operating system fun times doesn't have to keep track of so much stuff. I mean it was a good idea back in Windows 95, but nowadays it's just a waste of memory.

Originally Posted by The Dopefish

Question though: my Games folder on my desktop isn't a shortcut to a folder on my main drive, it's a folder full of shortcuts. Should I change it to how you explained it, or is it fine the way it is?

A folder full of shortcuts is fine because that takes up like no memory footprint. But if you want to be fancy move that folder to your C drive and then make a shortcut to it on your Desktop. Then you can give it a dandy little shortcut icon when you right click and go to its properties~

And by the way my grievances and points were just made in general. I had no idea if your machine was treated like a trashheap or not when I wrote my post. They're just tips.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Well I did everything you suggested, Acer, but nothing seemed to work. I tried cleaning out my case out of desperation (to be fair, there was a healthy amount of dust inside) and that also didn't work, so I reformatted. (I'm now kicking myself for not exporting my iTunes Classic Rock playlist.)

Since I reformatted things seemed to have improved but to save myself any future aggravation (and to just finally upgrade) I popped on NewEgg and bought this. It's nothing spectacular, but there's a lot of numbers from 6600GT to 9500GT so I figure it'll be an improvement at the very least.

FELIPE NO