Recent Performance Issues

I'll just start off by saying my computer basically sucks. 768GB of RAM and an old school video card. It gets me around 25fps in GW on medium settings which is tolerable. Lately, however, the fps has been about cut in half. Also, I sit looking at a loading screen for sometimes up to a minute.

The only thing I've done that may be whats causing problems was installing a new internal HD. I moved Guild Wars onto it to make space on my old one. I set up my new hard drive(160G) as a slave to my old one(40G). My friend told me that installing a new HD should have no effect on my computers performance, but is that really true? I've known him to be wrong before

Anyways, please post if you have any suggestions. I know my comp sucks, you don't have to remind me.

I have 1gb of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9600XT 128mb and Guild Wars runs tolerably on high. Though, your right, I have definately noticed some performance issues the past week or so.

Alright thanks for the input. Anyone have any ideas if the new HD might be effecting things though?

You said you "moved" Guild Wars onto the new drive? As in, clicked and dragged it there? The Windows Registry records where everything is installed on your computer. Moving a program elsewhere usually results in it no longer working at all, but it could also be the cause of your problem if that's what you did. Increased load times might indicate your Gw.dat file was lost/corrupt.

There is no pure hardware reason why having another hard drive could slow down your PC. I have three internal drives and one external, personally.

Defragment your hard drive.

Well I don't think that is the problem. When I went to starting up guild wars after I moved it onto the new drive it asked me the location of it. I simply clicked on it in my new drive and pressed open and it worked fine. Lately I've seen that it is not only guild wars that has been slow lately though. In fact, it seems everything is slow.

I'll try defraging my HD though.

Thanks a bunch for the input.

Puting a new hard drive in shouldn't give you performance issues. Sounds like you might need a fresh start. And you have a brand new spanking 160 drive to put it on. Make a backup of your GW folder onto a DVD or wherever so you dont have to re-install it again.! Formats are great for slow running computers that annoy the crap out of you. Just make sure you have the info on your hardware to get them up to date device drivers. Especially stuff like network drivers ready to install so you can get your internet connection back and get all the nice shiny updates

Yeah I'm no techie person, but perhaps it's just a sign that you need to do some routine cleaning.

Defrag, disk cleanup, registry cleanup.

All I can say is, for me, if I don't do those basic cleaning chores, issues show up in GW. When I do the above, it makes a a big difference. So hopefully it's just something that simple with your issues

If anything, the new hard drive should improve the performance of Guild Wars. The files you copied to the new drive would be "defragged" in the process.
Be sure to clean up the old drive and defrag it just to improve overall Windows performance though.

Check for spyware and viruses.

That's a very common misconception. Files and old data being transferred to a new drive still can get fragmented in the process.