FPS decreasing over time (texture issue?)

I have a dell laptop with 2 gigs of ram, centrino 2ghz, and ati radeonx300 with 128mb of dedicated video memory on windows xp media edition....

i used to play guild wars like six months ago, with the settings set to the highest or second highest (i forget) at 1680x1050 and it ran perfectly smoothly (there was no FPS thing back then that i remember). since then my hard drive corrupted and i replaced it. recently, i started playing guild wars again and downloaded the client, started playing again.

once again, i went to the video settings, and the default/recommended setup was once again on the second highest setting. now when i play, when i start, the FPS is pretty good (30-40), but over time, the FPS decreases too the point of like 10 fps, which is very annoying. even decreasing the graphic settings has pretty much no effect on the process- starts off high and goes down even at lowest settings and lower resolutions.

now i think it is a problem with the way textures are streamed or something, since the only other problem i ever get is that sometimes when i'm moving over long distances, the textures dont load right away. meaning that i'll be running, the ground will be very blurry and all of a sudden all the textures will pop in making it look like it should.

i have the latest drivers off the dell website for my video card (the ones off the ATI website always say incompatible hardware for some reason), and i defragmented the hard drive, so i'm not quite sure what the problem is, but my guess is it has something to do with texture streaming.

edit: i just checked the defrag report, for some reason, it cant defrag the guild wars .dat file, i dont know why? any help with that?

anyone have any ideas on how to fix it? as it is, i close the game after like every quest and restart it after like 2 mins and watch my FPS slowly go down again.

It might be the same problem that all these people are having (it's been annoying me for months, although my FPS doesn't drop quite as low as yours):
http://guildwars.incgamers.com/forum...d.php?t=392189

In that case, it seems to be an issue with the sound engine, that hopefully will be fixed soon. Until then, you can try running the game without sound (-mute or -nosound switch), and see if that helps.

Regarding defragging, try the Contig program, which is mentioned in this thread:
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10037429