Windows XP Home...*Sigh*

Well, as I said I was afraid of earlier, it does sound like you have a video card on the way out.

1. I know your sound is OK, but please just turn it off, and see if that affects game performance.

2. Try normal resolution for your game but set the colours to 24bit then 16 bit and see if that makes any difference?

3. In your control panel, display, troubleshooter, try setting "hardware acceleration" to 50% then lower until off.

I would guess that "event viewer" doesn't show anything in the logs?

:(

I'll give that a try in a bit, right now I'm running the Memtest86 program.

IT's been running a little over an hour with zero errors. I'm looking for the warrenty as I think it's still valid which would make things easier, I'd just need to reformat again and set it up the way it was when Dell sent it lol.

If they see GRUB as it's booting they'll send it back most likely.

BEsides the Stale Windows syndrome.. you could have an issue with the HDD..

Being an upset/corrupted Controller driver
Ditto for the IDE channell drivers
etc etc..

removing these devices and restarting should load clean drivers..

One other thing get a hold of HDDRegenerator and do a scann of your lappies HDD.. if it iscanns at or less than 1000sectors/second you have a hdd problem.. but the purpose of this is to see if there aren't any failing or corrupt sectors (this prg will fix them-95% sure) (HDD REGEN can be found on Hirens Boot CD)

I checked the HD drive already and it didn't seem to have anything wrong, and I had it checked for bad sectors and things of that nature. Nothing came up, and nothing came up in the memory test either, which is still leading me down video card alley.

Not sure about this, but wouldn't HD errors show up while doing the chkdsk on Windows or the scans Linux offers? One of my machines has a bad HD and it showed up while using some of the tools I have for Linux, but on this one nothing.

The HD was something I was thinking too because the games all have something running from them, Doom for example runs completly off the HD and UT doesn't run off just the CDs either so I was thinking that but after the chkdsk and other things I ran on it, it didn't show anything wrong with the HD itself, just a few file system problems that were taken care of after the format.

A few hours ago I installed Slackware on it and had it check the HD and test for bad sectors and there were no problems at all.

IMHO....I think you are right........its the video card.

either its the driver...or the card is not working as it should...hardware fault of some sort.

MLF

Yea, I'm pretty sure of the card itself too. The driver as I said, I tried the one the CDs came with, the one Windows Update offers, and one I downloaded from Nvidia myself, and all 3 gave the same results.

Though I am going to install the Linux driver on my Slackware install just to rule out any Windows Driver problems.

Hey gore just a few more tests :D

http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm

Get Prime95 and try to run it for an hour or two. It will really test your RAM, and if you have problems you will get an error message. It is quite different from MemTest86, that does not stress the system.

Also, there are demo versions of UT2003. Does the Windows Demo lag as well? if it does, then try the Linux version. If that lags, then it is almost certainly the hardware (card).

You might try the driver I posted a link to............. it is a third party tweak, neither Windows nor nVidia ;)

10 gig free?

Windows is crap with disks. If I had a 30 gig hard drive and had 10 free windows would slow to a crawl. If it's a bigger hard drive even worse because there is only 10 free. ESPECIALLY if the OS is on the same drive, I mean same physical drive.

Quote:

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If I had a 30 gig hard drive and had 10 free windows would slow to a crawl.

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I believe it all has to do with the system partition size....windows likes minimum 20 % on the system drive....or any drive partition for that to swap the memory.....but especially the system...

Have seen slow downs with printing,pdfs etc....with temp directories filling up...although not so much with xp

Sounds hardware to me..seeing those games are video intense....points to the video ...maybe not configured right in the BIOS or the hardware is flawed.

Have seen video cards get so hot from that the fans stop working ...the fan has actually starts to melt...then the machine will randomly crash when running video intense apps....

Nvidea...gforce....2-3 years old...cant remember the exact cards...had a couple of engineering machines with the same cards...same problem.

I have also seen a logitech mouse driver crash NT4. and auto cad......may be a driver conflict???

Was fixed by using a previous mouse driver......


Just throwing out stuff.....

MLF

gore, why don't you play UT2004? maybe we can have a deathmatch one day....also ave you played Quake 4 yet...i'm gonna have to buy it soon, looks slick...