Crazy stuttering

It is pretty normal if you enter a crowded town but nowadays the stuttering almost jams the screen when enemies come first time to your sight radius. This is especially annoying in random arena. Heavy loading (i don't mean loading screen) makes you "lag" a lot for few seconds. I have played GW since May 2005 and this kind of stuttering is pretty fresh phenomenon. Factions started it and now it is worser in Nightfall.

My hard drive has been defragged (just checked with contig) and there is 1.5 GiB RAM. Prophecies never had this until second chapter came. I'm wondering if they somehow screwed GW.DAT archive so it is a lot slower to access at least to some parts of it. The size of GW.DAT is currently 2.87 GiB and I run -image parameter everytime when a new update comes.

Anyone else experiencing same or is my hard drive dying?

This is very annoying, especially in PvP arenas. I have noticed this problem on every machine i have played so far. Anyone knows how to get rid of this or what is causing this? Maybe there is someone who do not experiencing this?
I also remember times when there was no such thing. As far as I know this can have something to do with december 20th, 2006 update.
My HDD is 100% defragmented and I have 2GB of RAM.
I'll appreciate any help.

I think it's the game caching the skins and skills other people are using. If that's true, it's nothing wrong with your computer, just bad programming.

Basically it just depends on your computer speed and video card. Since your video card has to render multiple things at that one second, it may make your screen stutter. I have a dual core 3.0 gig processor and HD radeon 2900 XT. I don't lag often, even on all high quality. But basically what happens is if you average 30 fps, you'll drop down to like 10 on a big load. For me, I start out at 300ish and drop down to 80 on a big load. So basically by having lower quality settings and a buffer for your fps, you shouldn't get as much of a stutter.

Defragging the near 4GB dat files helps immensely.

Same thing happens to me.