Minimizing to look at something, then it lags

I'm sure many of you have used resources like Guildwiki, MSN, or other programs while you were playing guild wars. You end up using the minimize button or Alt+tab to minimize the GW window to look at the other window.

I'll be playing the game and I'll have a very good connection, good FPS, all that. Then I minimize it to look at a mission guide, or in the case of this afternoon accidentally becuase my antivirus decided to run a scan... and when I come back to the game It will be horribly laggy, so such so i can't play. I was curious if anyone else had this same problem, and whether anyone knew a fix for this..?

How much RAM do you have? With one gigabyte this doesn't happen much unless there's loads of other programs running, 512 MB's not enough to avoid the lag most of the time.

If there isn't enough to keep both GW and the other programs in memory at the same time while leaving some room for disk cache and other things, the operating system will have to move the memory pages used by Guild Wars to the hard drive to free some RAM. When GW accesses those memory pages again they have to be loaded from the hard drive, causing the lag you've described.

Try shutting down any programs you don't need or just get more RAM if there's nothing left to close and it still lags after switching between GW and other applications.

Try running in windowed mode.

Are you sure its actually connection lag you're experiencing? Or is it a graphical glitch where your character (and other creatures) hop all overt he place?

I brought this up with a group of friends in game and they all get this weird 'jumping' glitch after minimizing then maximizing too. If you click somewhere on the ground, you can see your character on that spot before getting there which really hurts the eyes.

FPS and PING remain the same for me so its probably a bug in the game client. My gut instict tells me that the game is designed to be resourceful when minimized and it makes short-cuts but it doesn't always revert back to normal when maximized. Just a thought.

Ugghhh... I don't care what AV program you have...I've tried several... some are bigger resource hogs than others yes, but nonetheless, they're all resource hogs. I do not let the scan run in the bg while I've got the game open. I rescheduled the regular scan to a time when I don't ever play.

And yeah... what he said... *points up to Yanman's post*

Thank you for your replies

I have 2 gigs of Ram, though I'm operating Vista HP. What's odd about it is that I didn't really have this problem a month ago, so it's a new thing. And in the background, the only major programs I have running usually are MSN and... possibly an internet window if i need a mission guide, but that's usually not the case. The Antivirus thing was completely off the wall, the first thing I did when I got the computer was set it to automatically scan at 2:00 am, so it's kind of odd. It seems to be every time when I minimize though. Even if it's just a quick thing for an odd reson, whenever I maximize the screen it starts lagging very badly. And when I say lagging, what I mean is that it jumps down to about 10-6 FPS. The game is still operating, it just looks like a slideshow. If i click the ground, my character will move there, just at 9 FPS.

I have exactly the same problem. I posted it in various Windows Vista threads here, sent a support ticket, but still no solution.

Win Vista 32, AMD Athlon 64x2, nForce4 SLI, Geforce 7800GT, 2 GB DDR.

I've had this problem too and I have 1 gig ram. One solution that I use is Free Ram XP Pro (just google the name, it's a free program, recommeded by PC World). You can run that when your ram is low. The only problem is that it takes a minute or so to run back to normal but after that, it's all good.

Thanks, I might try that

i have 2g of ram, and it just does that.
if you minimize any graphics intensive game, and then maximize it again it is going to lag for a minute, even age of empires will do that. (more pronouncedly with less ram)

I never have any lag problems coming back to GW but I certainly do with BF2 so I'll have to try this, thanks for the info.

On a side note I've notice that GW.dat tends to fragment constantly, probably due to new updates. I have a program that can just defragment single folders and files which saves time for me and has gotten my GW performing better then ever.

Contig is the program, and if you dont feel like figuring out the command lines and entering them in get Power Defragmenter GUI which skins contig to be more push-a-button user friendly. Just throw contig.exe in the same folder as power defragmenter gui.exe and it should work fine.

I suggest a few sweeps through GW.dat, sometimes its in so many fragments that it needs to be done a few times before getting it down as small as it will go.

It happens on my other computer also, for about 5 seconds or so, even though the computer has one of the latest AMD's, 1GB of Graphics card memory and 2GB RAM. I think it is going to happen with any graphically impressive game.

It happens when you enter a new town also, before everything has loaded up. I think it's the same thing.

If you use window mode, and then just drag the corner so that it takes up all the space of your screen except the toolbar, it should be just as good, and you don't need to minimize. It's what I do.

I'm running PerfectDisk 8 from time to time. It has nothing to do with disk or defragmentation. The same install on Windows 2000 does not have this problem.

(I have GW on separate partition so I can install another Windows without removing the game)

It's also not an out-of-memory issue, because my machine is not using pagefile (=having lots of disk activity) after restoring.

Try using Alt+Enter instead.

This will cause your full screen to switch to windowed mode so you can shrink the window and let it sit in the background of whatever it is you have to do. To get back to full screen, just select the GW window and hit Alt+Enter again.