Sluggish

GW runs quit sluggish on my computer, from what i read. people are running it on really under spec computers...
my spec is :
pentium 4 2ghz
256 DDR RaM
GeForce 3 550Ti
My internet speed is 1mb broadband

Why does it run like this..........yes my drivers are up 2 date

I suspect it's your RAM. The operating system itself usually takes up a big chunk of memory so whatever else you might have left for the game itself is not enough. You need atleast 512 megs to run this game at a decent speed without it having to pause once in a while to catch up to itself.

the ram i have is DDR2100 , its kinda of expensive now...

You could get a stick of Kingston 256mb for under $30 right now. Generic is even more reasonable.

i live in the UK

Hi Danny try this site

www.insight.com

remember to select the UK region. They deleiver quickly and have some of the best prices around.

http://uk.insight.com/apps/productpr...t_id=KTEA02LRC

Thats a quick link, it's £18.79 inc VAT it might be worth getting a few other bits and pieces to spread teh delivery cost.

I have a different question to ask.

The game is sluggish in what way? Is the action on the screen not smooth or do you get blocks of "freeze" where nothign happens until your hard drive finishes accessing something?

I've monitored resource usage of Guild Wars on my system. I have 1GB of RAM and Guild Wars will usually comfortably take up 170+ MB of it. Assuming you have every other process not running you should just barely be able to squeeze in the game but will experience some loading difficulties when you encounter new areas or creatuers.

The video card you are running is several generations behind the curve and might just not be keeping up with whatever settings you have the game set to. We can explore that as well.

System takes up about 160MB, so you ahve a swap of about 80mb. also Windows likes to keep some Physical ram free, this will mean your swap files gets hammered. If your runngin Windows XP you shoudl ahve at least a gig of ram for gaming. XP is a memeory hog, thats why I still use 2k.

No doubt about it, extra RAM (at LEAST 512MB system RAM) would definitely help, but that video card is pretty weak too and might need some review.

BTW, a buddy of mine plays Guild Wars on a machine with 512MB RAM without any sluggish or load issues and he runs xp pro. He has no problems keeping up with my similar system with 1GB RAM.

Just as a heads up, your running it on pretty well the lowest system requirements possible. Sluggish is what you should be expecting.

DDR 2100 is extreamly old, and running either 2 128's or 1 256 stick just won't cut it. I'll assume the computer is probley 6 years old, but what is the mother board? You are in dire need of a memory upgrade to at least 2 sticks of 256 2700 DDR RAM. The performance issue is probley caused due to slow hardware, thats it.

If your board can take them, 3200 DDR sticks would be your best bet, they are decent enough for all types of computer users and are a pretty decent price for a 256.

What is the memory on your video card? If its less then 64, then a G3 Ti 64 is again, bottom of the barrel for graphic cards that can work this game.

Overall, its just your system. Its pretty old.

Motherboard ID 06/09/2002-I845G/ICH4-P4B533VM

Motherboard Name Asus P4B533-VM

Thats the information i could get on my motherboard

I also got this off my manufacturers website

The Vig500s Motherboard has the following features:

Feature Summary
The VIG500S motherboard supports Intel Pentium 4 & Celeron processors
with
256KB of second-level cache (128KB for Celeron) integrated in a Socket
478
operating at speeds up to 2.2GHz +
The motherboard features:
Form factor:
* Micro ATX form factor.
Processor:
* Single Pentium 4 or Celeron processor.
* 400/533FSB.
* Integrated 256KB second-level cache
* Socket 478 connector.
Main memory:
* Two 184-pin DIMM sockets.
* Support for up to 2GB of 266MHz DDR memory.

I'd also like to add that theres nothing wrong graphics wise, its just when im in a party with someone it runs a bit slow, i think thats due to ram and when i am in a town with lots of people it runs slow, also loading times are long...no more than 2-3min....but i consider that long

I think the "lots of people" issue is mainly your video card, and the slow loading is your RAM. With that amount, it's probably making your hard drive work overtime writing to the page file.