Computer lag

VLC player, Youtube, Guild Wars, etc. There is sound artifacts and it has a moment where the sound and game works for a few split second and stops for a split second within 1-3 seconds. It's like shuttering, stuttering, or lag...or something. Frame rate drops sometimes, but not always. I generally have a double digit ping and 40-65 frames per second.

Pentium D but I recently bought an ATI 4650 and 2GB of RAM to replace a GT 6600 and 1GB. The computer works much better, but it did not fix this issue. I don't see how this can effect video or music from a media player... Both gpu's had the latest drivers.

Help?

Your lag might be caused by your hard drive using too much resources at once. Maybe try to close background applications or monitor your HDD.

ME TOO! I've had this happening with vista and win7... the screen gets all messed up too for a few secs

My first questions are; How much free space (as a percentage) do you have on your hard drive? When was the last time you defraged your hard drive?

72 GB used
110 GB free
14 GB of fragmented files.

Haven't used Defraggler in a month or so, perhaps.

Tried running "Contig" (its like defrag but for single files) on your gw dat? i seem to recall that after a while my dat was a bit "messy" and contig helped a fair amount.

But sounds like u could use defrag if you run gw a lot, and maybe check to see what crap you have running in the background with task manager, its possible some stuff is hoggin all your ram/cpu time.

Stuttering could be a sound card/new driver issue.

Sound was greatly effected when the defragger was running. So does that mean I should get a new hard drive?

I don't have a new sound card or drivers.

I have a 2.4GHZ Processor, on-board graphics, and 512MB of ram. I run at 240ms ping and 10FPS. I just upgraded my ram to 1GB and I now run at 130ms ping and 30FPS. So I doubt it's your hardware, I think it's all the programs you run at once, does the lag happen more when the games minimized, windowed, or full screen?

~TheLyfe21.

The defrag process pounds the hard drive and it's normal for the process to cause slow down, other things while it's running.

When the defrag is finished, you should go back to normal performance once the process if finished.

Doesn't matter.

Comodo, Avast, GW, Trillian, and maybe Safari is too much?

Make sure your windows has all latest patches/updates and get the latest drivers for ALL your hardware - motherboard, audio and video.

P.s - the problem is not likely to be associated with your hard drive, although the motherboard's IDE/SATA drivers could be involved.