Computer Help

[Frozenmoses]

Okay, I need some wisdom here. I have a pretty nice computer, but it has been having some serious issues. Any time I try playing a game with decent graphics, I get horrid performance, even with the options at pretty much the bare minimum. I tried defragging last night to see if that would help, but it didn't do much, if anything. Anyone have some advice as to what help my computer's performance?

The specs are:

Pentium 4: 3.20 ghz
1.00 GB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 AGP, 128 mb graphics card
64 GB 7200RPM HD

So, uh... help me make my computer stop sucking? Please?

:help:

[GonePostal]

It's a laptop right? That video car is not the greatest... depending on the game it's going to suck ass. If that's not the case then try reinstalling drivers for the card.

[txterry]

It worked fine before ?

Reinstall or update video drivers.

Is there a lot of disk activity when the game is running ?
You may have many background processes running and swapping pages inspite of 1GB RAM. Go to windows task manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and check out memory usage and processes. Kill or remove any unecessary processes running in the background to identify the problem.

[Stephen Riddington]

I agree with Terry, either update drivers and if there's other apps running at the same time, close them, and just open the game.

[anyone]

With those kind of specs, you've probably got a crapload of spyware running on your computer or a virus....

aquire spybot search and destroy and/or Ad-aware, run it
update your virus protection, do a full scan
and stop running Internet Explorer, use Mozilla, firefox, or Opera instead

[JSully]

format and reinstall everything..

hmm... but really, I agree with "anyone" and "txterry"

Now, if that doesn't work then format and reinstall everything. Then never get on the internet with it because if you never get on the internet with it then you will never get viruses and spybot programs. :D

[crazedwombat]

yea, update the drivers... plus, download adaware and spybot..they do a good job and slaying spyware and its all free...

[bigedge]

yep another one for that last option here

[txterry]

With those kind of specs, you've probably got a crapload of spyware running on your computer or a virus....

aquire spybot search and destroy and/or Ad-aware, run it
update your virus protection, do a full scan
and stop running Internet Explorer, use Mozilla, firefox, or Opera instead


Yes spyware is known for slowing down PC's. Spybot has an immunize feature which prevents much spyware from being installed in the first place tho it will pop up messages last version I installed. AdAware's new SE Personal works well in removing spyware.

[Frozenmoses]

Cool, thanks for all the tips guys.