Whining

[Hucklebubba]

So yesterday, I decided to finally pick up a copy of Halo for the PC, on account of it's cheap now, and I wanted to see what all the fuss is about.

That said, I will now trumpet my PC's game-relevant system specs for the sake of context:

3 Ghz Pentium IV with Hyper-Threading (whatever that is)

1024 MB RAM

ATI Radeon 9250--256 MB VRAM


If I understand things correctly, my PC should be able to kick the ever-loving crap out of Halo, and yet here I am, running the game at 800x600 with details set to medium, and it still gets all choppified whenever anything significant is happening onscreen.

I might not mind so much, were this an isolated incident, but Halo is merely the latest addition to the illustrious and ever-swelling ranks of games my PC has an inexplicable rough time with.

Suggestions and theories from resident computer geeks are appreciated, but I mainly just wanted to engage in some superficial and self-absorbed pissing and moaning. Anyone who cares to complain alongside me is more than welcome.

[bladestarr]

I'd say try shutting down all unneccessary programs. There may be some memory hogs running on your system that you don't know about. The easiest way to find these (IF you are using Windows XP) is like this:

Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete once. This should bring up the new Windows Task Manager, that looks like this:



Then click the Mem Usage column header TWICE to sort it with the memory hogs at the top of the list, like so:



You can see there that Shareaza (my file sharing program of choice) is using the most memory. From this window you can click on a task and choose End Task to close these programs one by one, including hidden programs you may not be able to see otherwise. WARNING: I'd suggest you do NOT close any programs with the SYSTEM user name, it won't mess up your computer permanently, but it may cause it to shut down for the moment. Just shut down the ones you don't need under your user name, except explorer.exe which is your graphical interface (start bar mostly).

The next step is to remove some things permanently.
Click The Start button, then Run like so:



In the window that appears, type "msconfig" without the quotation marks then click Ok. The System Configuration Utility Window should appear. Click on the services tab, it should look like this:



Now click on the Hide All Microsoft services button so you don't mess up anything really important. This is a list of many of the programs that start up with your computer. Some startup programs are elsewhere, but these are usually the main memory hogs. Take a look at mine:



I unchecked all the programs I KNEW I didn't need to start when my computer starts up. VNC Server is a remote control program so that me and my buddies in our house can control each other's PCs from our PC, so we don't have to move our lazy butts over to their computer, so I leave that on. And the AVG stuff is my antivirus program of choice, so I leave those checked.

Final step once you've unchecked the ones that you don't need, click the Startup tab on that window and see the rest of the startup programs. It will look something like this:



Uncheck any of these that you don't want running at startup. Most of these are what I call "seed" programs, pieces of larger programs that are loaded into memory at startup so that when you do open the main program it starts that much faster. I think that's bull. The common seed programs you see here are NeroCheck (for Nero burning ROM), NvCPL (that little green NVidia control panel in your system tray), qttask AND iTunesHelper (Apple Quicktime), Adobe Reader Speed Launch (Adobe Acrobat). These are all safe to uncheck. The ones I left checked are my sharing program Shareaza, my instant messaging program of choice (Gaim, try it!), and another part of AVG AntiVirus.

So click Ok when you got all these things unchecked, then restart your computer. If you don't like what happens then you can always go back in and recheck these items. This should free up alot of memory and processor time, so good luck!

[DocD83]

Unless I'm mistaken, it might also help to defragment your hard drive and clear up some space. I know my computer gets sluggish if it has to do a lot of sifting to find places to store stuff in virtual memory--of course, I have half the physical memory you do and I run an older version of Windows, so I may be completely wrong here.