Runs fine for a while then really choppy/Laggy

Hi,
My question is why when I play this game It runs great for a while (1-2 hours) then It just gets so choppy that you cant do anything until I restart the whole computer and reload the game, then it's back to normal for a while again.

Specs on the PC are:

Internet is DSL
Xp Professional w/service pack 2
Pentium 4 2.66 Ghz
1 GB of Ram
60 Gb hard drive
550 Watt Power supply
ATI Radeon 9550 256MB Video Card all the drivers and such are up to date as well.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Router?

Man, why are people always so quick to blame the router? LOL

Routers are fairly "fire and forget" as long as people don't mess with all the settings.

Anyway... even she didn't even mention a router it would be easy to try the game without the router in the loop and see if that fixes it.

Otherwise, look in this thread since your problems sound similar and a lot of good troubleshooting tips are in that thread also.

Good luck,
Nova-

Thanks guys but its not the router and a new hard drive was recently installed so its clean inside..I need that easy button from that Staples Commercial lol.

It is possible that it is a heat problem. I'm not saying it is for sure or anything, but my laptop's heat sinks were so caked with dust that air was scarcely able to leave the box. Cleaned it out and performance increased 110%.

i would say its over heating

p4's have thermal management built in that underclocks the cpu when it gets warm to allow it to cool down. its a pain in the arse if you actually need the full processor speed but hey thats the price you pay for intel

check inside the case and clean all dust from the heatsink and fan (hsf) assembly as dust is a superb thermal insulator. you may also need to increase airflow through the case in order to stop heat building up. you should already have a fan at the rear of the case venting hot air out. if not then you need to get one. i recommend the largest size the case will accept. you may also find it necssary to introduce a fan at the front of the case for intake. once you have done that ensure all cables are out of the way of the airflow and hopefully you should be much cooler

go here for a more in depth look at case cooling

Yes - but WHY is it overheating?

I notice that while this game is running and ONLY this game, it forces my system resources to 100%! Same with my friend whom I play the game with.

I think the issue is the game itself. There is no way that this game should be consuming all of a systems resources. Systems can't run at that pace for long without complications.

I have the same problem Dude and as they say open the case and place a fan on the computer.

that is how i solve the exact same problem and but i recently have been reciving a error were GW reboots and tells that it is due to a microprocesor averhaeating i dont understan why GW is overheating my machine and FEAR which i olso like to play i dont have any problem of this kind.

Thanks guys, it does run at 100% when the games running. And when it starts getting choppy even if i shut the game off its stays at 100%. I have a clear sided case with a fan in the side and one in the front and two other fans. Thing's almost as loud as a B-52, guess thats not enough tho. I'll see what I can do. Thanks

check your vid card and make sure the fan is running on that too.... could be ur vid card that's overheating

Try defragmenting your system.

does the problem still occur if you run with -dx8? (this is just something to try to get more idea what the problem could be... after you try it remove that flag again so you get all the nice features that only show up when running with DirectX 9)

Well we wiped the computer monday night and tuesday night I and had gw runnin for 7 hours straight , computer worked flawlessly even after i shut the game down. Sooo maybe it was something that was loaded on the thing before that had a million other things running in the background.. We'll see how it runs today.

Here's a simple experiment you can try, SueAnne, to see if it's indeed a heat issue (I'm just guessing that rebooting may give your computer enough time to cool down a bit).

Try two different tests... Run GW until you have problems, then just close the game and immediately restart the game (don't reboot). I'm presuming you typically still have problems at that point.

Next, run the game until you have the same sort of issues. Quit the game and let the computer cool down for about 10 minutes or so (put it into sleep mode or something like that). Start up GW again (again, don't reboot).

If the game runs fine after the cool-down period, but not when you re-start immediately, then you can pretty safely say that your computer is overheating. If you can only solve the problem by rebooting, then the problem is something else.

^ Heh, too late Dutch, seems like shes formatted her PC and it works flawlessly now.