Slight judderyness in games?

[johnnr892]

Hi, when i run games like call of duty, the sims 2 far cry i ever so often just get a slight judder and the hardrive makes a noise. I'm assuming it's paging the hardrive for memory. My system is 2600xp, 512 2700 ram, 80gb maxtor ata133, 9800 pro. I would have though i have enough ram or do i need to make the step to 1gb?

[Shogun]

You should have enough ram but upgrading to 1gb would always help when running alot of tasks. I'm not sure if upgrading to pc3200 ram would make alot of difference but i suspect it might.

[johnnr892]

But if i did upgrade to pc3200 ram i would have to run it at pc2700 speeds because of my processor running at 333. I have only had this new computer for a month but I admit i went a bit crazy and insatlled a load of different applications on it. do you think it would help if i did a clean install and was careful next time?

[johnnr892]

where can i look at the page file settings or whatever it is? Oh and in the bios it says my agp aperture(whatever that is) is at 64mb, i would have though it would be at 128 since my gpu has 128mb?

[Shogun]

Normally the agp aperture size is double your gfx ram or half your system ram iirc.

[johnnr892]

so for me it should be 256mb?

[Proplus]

I would say its a ram issue here. I bought Sims 2 and installed it on a few of my machines and each run runs it OK. The slowest machine I installed it on is my XP2000+ with 9800SE AIW, but it has 1Gb of ram in it.

[johnnr892]

Oh, if i was going to clean install win xp na dre-install it would i just boot from win-xp disc, click setup windows, find my (only have on partition) c:/ partition, delete it and install windows again?

[Shogun]

so for me it should be 256mb?

Try it and see. If that doesn't help then try reducing it to 128, thats really the min it should be at anyway. I thought it would be not enough ram as the sims 2 really eats up ram.

[Ravens Nest]

I found the stuttering reduced on my PC, when i set my AGP size to 512MB (But i have 1GB of ram so may be different for yourself)

Also if you have a second HD then put your pagefile on that drive, away from the drive Windows was installed to.

Try also having Fast writes turned off (if you have it on) but before you turn it off run your Smartgart in your ATI drivers and turn it off there first then restart your PC and turn fastwrites off in the BIOS there.

Hope this helps you.

[johnnr892]

so basically i should play around with my agp aperture size and maybe set to 128mb or 256mb but if that fails get 1gb or ram.

[Shogun]

Yea, try 256, should help

[johnnr892]

So i tried putting the aparture size to 128, and started a game of Far Cry. All going well (but a lot of grinding and groning from the hardrive) then i die (nothing new there) and it locks up and crashes to desktop VPU recover, graphics card wasn't responding something to do with ram buffer. So she didnt like that. Do you think maybe i have too many processes going on in the background (33). How do i find out how much of the ram they are using up. I think maybe I will have to reformat ( i dont have any data on there at the moment to lose) but i don't know how to,lol. Any help would be again appreciated.

[Shogun]

I have about 30 processes running all the time so that shouldnt be a problem. If you go ctrl-alt-delete and look under the performance tab there should be a section called physical memory (k). This will show how much is being used up on what you are running atm and how much is free.

[johnnr892]

total=523760
available=284940
That seems an awful lot being used up. hmmm any suggestions,is this normal?

[Ravens Nest]

so basically i should play around with my agp aperture size and maybe set to 128mb or 256mb but if that fails get 1gb or ram.

Yeah pretty much 128 or 256, You need 1GB to run Farcry without any stuttering at all and HD Grinding.

You could be having a lot of processes running, look at all the icons in the bottom right hand corner of your desktop (near the time display)

press the RMB on each icon and see if they have a option to allow them to be turned off.

Also goto START-RUN
Type
msconfig

A menu will appear goto the tab "startup"

And go through the list shown, pick any programs you dont want to run when you start your PC and take the tick that is next to them off.

Be careful dont take the ticks off any items, if you dont know what they are.

This will hopefully give you some memory back.

Also check your PC for adaware and viruses
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/
http://security.kolla.de/

http://www.free-av.com/

And another way to get more ram back is to turn off services that you dont use.

Here's a link to a site that has hints on what to turn off on your PC.
http://www.blackviper.com/