Changing the priority of Guild Wars

When I go check the task manager, Guild Wars is always set to Low priority (which might be why I'm always getting mini lag spikes). As soon as I change the priority to something else, it always resets itself back to Low.

System specs:
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2180 2ghz
Nvidia Geforce 8800 gt
2 GB RAM

Without Guild Wars, CPU usage is 0-4% and Physical memory available is 1.4 GB

i'm not sure if the "low priority" is the reason for your lag spikes.
however, i think it reads "low priority" because it will always reset to that whenever you minimize gw or if it goes out of focus, i.e. to check the task manager. (dun quote me on that though)

snaek is correct. GW will change itself to low priority once you alt-tab out of it, such as when you look at task manager. it will reset itself to normal once you go back into the game.

Meh, I guess I'll have to live with having the task manager open then.

Also, I now have Guild Wars on Realtime/High, but I still get frequent mini lag-spikes every few seconds, from 200ms to 400ms, making Guild Wars hard to play.
I tried everything in the sticky topic about lag (except sending a ticket to the support staff, which I will attempt if no one here is able to troubleshoot my issue).

Anyways, thanks snaek and moriz for the info.

I dont think its related to your PC/Net, my old PC had the same processors, with an 8600 vid card, and same RA. and i have slower internet than you, so i would highly doubt its related to those.

the mini lagspike issue is extremely common for guildwars. my pc outstrips yours by a pretty big margin in terms of hardware, and suffers the same issue.

it's not so much GW's servers, but it's to do with how your connection to the server is routed. some ISPs upload providers just don't seem to like GW for some reason. unfortunately for us poor SOBs, there's nothing we can do about it.

I find it weird that 200ms to 400ms spikes you bad enough to make it hard to play gw - im on p4 3ghz with 1 gig ram and 512md vid card and i always have game in low res and avg ping for me is around 400ms and game runs smooth.Even in high res the pings around 500ms , remember part of gw lag isnt just connection speed but ram and video card.
Wife is stubborn and uses beyond belief a 32meg card and she has done all campaigns and does ab etc at the rate of 12fps and her pcs 2.8gz and sometimes its funny lookin at her screen when it does get spiked bigtime.

QQ, let's protest and flood our ISPs with support tickets/calls.


My GW does run smoothly (sort of), it's just that the small lag spikes make it interrupting in PvP/PvPing in general, difficult.
Like moriz says, my ISP probably does not like GW and yours does.

I think the main problem for everyone isnt always their isp but the actual connection line , i recall a friend in usa who had misfortune of having bad internet if it rained heavy , snowed or was too windy.The line could be fine at my end but between me and say gw server that could be where the problem is.
Like a lot of ppl will say - improve gw playability by
increasing Ram , getting a decent video card ( yes you can as my 512mb card only cost me 30 pounds ) , dont have a lot of programs running in background - i have a total of 32 background progs running when i play gw.
Ram and video card being priority - you could also do a small test if a friend has a pc with better vidcard/ram get them to your house and run gw off theirs and see if theres any difference - that would help see if you got a gd connection or not.

so many of you are confusing network lag with system lag. network lag is where there's an obvious connection issue, like jumping characters, action randomly slowing down/speeding up, etc. system lag is primarly video stuttering, slow camera rotation, poor animation, etc. you can get one and/or/nor the other.

improving your computer hardware will reduce/eliminate system lag, getting a better connection will reduce network lag. improving your computer hardware won't do jack squat about network lag, and vice versa.