Windows XP Home...*Sigh*

OK, on my Laptop, I had a nice dual boot set up of Slackware Linux 10.2 and Windows XP Home Edition. I wanted to play Unreal Tournament (This whole thread isn't about games) on my Windows Partition. I've played both Unreal Tournament, and Unreal Tournament 2003 on this Laptop before without problem.

So I start installing it, and finish. Start it up, and..... It starts playing, then LAGGING. I don't mean a little like when you play Doom 3 on the minimum specs, I mean it's borderline freezing up but the sound is there.

Hmm, OK, the last time it didn't work great because the hardware was really new. OK, I'll install UT2003 as I know it works perfectly on here. I removed it mainly to get more space when I wasn't playing it as much.

I grab the install CDs, and install it. When it gets done I start to play it and it starts working fine. A minute into the game, it starts doing the same thing. It's lagging horridly.

Think downloading 3TBs of Data over Dial Up. THAT much lag.

OK, now starting to worry, this is odd. Hmmm, what could it be..... So I start looking over a few things, I check the Graphics card out, and the driver is working fine. I start up Doom2 and it works fine. Hmmmmmmm, weird.

OK, start up Quake, no problems there....

OK those are old games though, and they don't run from the CD... Maybe it's the CD-ROM.... So I boot up my Windows 2000 Professional / SUSE 10.1 Dual Boot machine.

I install UT on there, and when it's done.... IT WORKS FINE......

Weird, a few months ago I was playing UT2003 on this very laptop without a problem, and now it just isn't working.

I remove the drivers for the video card. Reboot, try again, and again, still not working.

OK, download the newest DirectX (Grasping at straws at this point) and try that.

Reboot, nothing.

OK, getting pissed off wondering what the hell is doing this and why it won't play. I thought at first maybe the CD had a problem, but the installation went fine, no errors, and then installing on another machine works fine even though that one barely meets the minimum requirements, and does NOT have minimum for UT2003 meaning I can't play it, so why won't it work.

Check Nvidia.com and grab newest drivers. Go to install and it no longer supports the GeForceFX GO 5200.... OK, go to Windows update and make sure to install that driver.

OK, reboot, NOTHING AGAIN.

OK, I remember back when I wouldn't install XP SP2, AHA! Maybe that's it!

Take SP2 off and listen to it bitch about being taken off. It finishes, I reboot, NOTHING.

Get pissed off, do a back up and reformat the thing after removing all partitions so only Windows XP Home is on there. Finish the install, start installing all drivers from the CDs so everything is working. Finish up that, install UT2003 again..... SAME DAMN THING......

OK, can someone tell me how in the hell it's possible to take a game that works fine, then uninstall it after a while because you needed the space for a school project, and a few months later go to reinstall the game and for some reason it won't work????

I just finished installing the 8,000 updates for XP except for SP2, which by the way THANKS MICROSOFT! I LOVE HAVING A TASKBAR ICON TELLING ME WHEN SP1 SUPPORT ENDS EVEN WHEN I SAY DON'T SHOW UP!

Oh and a huge thanks for making the way to get rid of this annoyance being a REGISTRY EDIT!....Consumer OS my ass.

Anyone had even a remotely similar problem EVER? I just want to play UT2003....

Yes,

But with a game, and on Win2000................single boot, Athlon 1900+, 1024Mb PC2100 DDR.

I suspect that you might have the "SWS".............very nasty, and the Doc won't give you a scrip for it. :D

"SWS" is "Stale Windows Syndrome". You must have heard that "back then" we used to format and reinstall every six months or so? That was quite important, as it sort of "clogged up" for no apparent reason, and got progressively slower..............

I would bet that if you did a format and reinstall of XP SP2 you could play UT2003 with no problems.

There might be a few solutions that do not involve reformatting though? Unfortunately, you are they only guy who can do the experiments, as you actually have a box that is "conditioned" and it might take me ages to get one set up that way? (and I don't have a modern lappy to work with)

OK? Here goes:

1. In Taskbar & Start Menu, go to "advanced" and clear the recent documents and other crap.
2. Get CrapCleaner and run that.
3. Defragment your HDD
4. Go to your video settings and set everything to maximum
5. Set the PC to give priority to applications.
6. Set the page file to 2x the RAM

Please let me know what happens................anyway, what the hell do you want to play UT2003 for...........you have discovered a far better game (almost an Easter Egg):

Quote:

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Take SP2 off and listen to it bitch about being taken off

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Now you know that I will not be able to sleep tonight until I have tried that (several times :lildevil: )

Do not despair, I have an alternative solution (notice that she is in flower, indicating a plant of 5+ years age):

EDIT: Sorry, I know that this probably seems stupid, but would you try it with the sound disabled.

Hi,

I reformatted and just realised that even Doom is starting to lag a bit.... This is beyond weird. I tried Unreal Gold and it was lagging too even though that game can run on a Pentium 2 and this is a Pentium 4.

I'm starting to think maybe the video card maybe needs a replacement or something.

Nice Cacti ;)

Arrrgh!

I am afraid that does not sound too good to me. You have eliminated OS and other applications problems, which kinda points to the Video card on the way out?

The other obvious contender would be your RAM.............? you might try Memtest86 at some stage?

:)

Hard drive full?

No, it had more than 10 gigs.

Hmmmm,

Not a solution I am particularly happy with, but you could try this:

http://fredfred.net/skriker/?lp_lang_pref=en&p=297

It seems that there are some issues with your card, the official drivers and laptops?

Also try running a cleaning disk in your CD drive a couple of times.

I have encountered problems between video and sound drivers, so check that you have the latest drivers for your sound as well.

:)

Yea, I installed the Nvidia driver. And I know it's not the DVD drive, because Doom was lagging and it runs purely off the HD as does Quake.

I reformatted twice, and when I first played the game I didn't have any other driver but the one the restore CD came with, and then eventually the Windows update one that it offers, and I sued that oo, Ii've tried before and after both, so I'm pretty sure it's the video card.

Hmmmmm,

You might try this: http://freestone-group.com/video-car...ility-test.htm

And then check your RAM : http://www.memtest86.com/

You might also try:

1. Disabling sound
2. Disabling power saving
3. Reducing the resolution

And see if any of those make any difference?

:)

Well, when the resolution went lower, it gave a warning about me having an LCD and it would look like crap. It did that when I'd try playing games and I told it not to warn me again.

I haven't changed any of the hardware on the box, it's a Laptop, and sound works fine, the Power saving, I have it plugged in so it's not in use right now though I have played this game while at school without it being plugged in.

The sound card has it's actual driver installed so it's not a dummy driver.

I've tried everything but new video cards because I don't have any lying around and specially not for a laptop.

The RAM test is no biggie, SUSE CDs come with it and you don't need to install to do it. Actually I think all versions of Linux do.

I'm just going to hve to wait until I can take the thing in and have the card switched or something as this is the only thing going wrong. I've checked the HD, and checked everything else I can with what I have and the only time you notice it even has a problem is when you try playing a game on it.

Sounds works fine, the display looks normal and doesn't have any weird things on it... It seems to work fine other than when you try playing a game, and it doesn't matter which. It starts lagging it to crap and I get pissed off and turn the game off.

That's the only thing. Other than that everything else is working fine.

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...

I just woke up so I'm not running tests yet, I haven't had my first RedBull. But yea instead of installing UT2004, I installed the demo which runs off the HD, and it did the same thing.

And yea I have Quake 4, and Doom 3. I'm pretty good at both, and the original Quake, I can beat the last level in under a minute. ;) Without having to cheat.

Oh i never played the first Quake, are the game modes like deathmatch and CTF too ? or just missions....also never played doom 3, i should get it, the graphics look pretty sick

The original Quake does have Deathmatch if you play over a LAN, but the main game is.... Hard to explain, it's sort of like Doom, you play through levels and you have to get these pieces of something to unlock the last level, there are 4 main levels and each of those has like a bunch of sub levels you play through.

Once you've beaten all those the last one opens up. The boss at the last level can't be killed with weapons, you have to telefrag it.

Doom3 is awesome, it's like a horror movie with actual sequences of mvoie like stuff in the game, and I loved it. The graphics are beyond what any computer at the time could hold. Quake 4 looks similar to it.

Hey, gore ,

Can you check the Linux version of the demo as well. If that misbehaves then that is 99.99% proof that it is a hardware issue?

If it doesn't, then I would still keep driver problems and applications/services conflicts (Windows based) in the frame for maybe 20-25% ?

Incidentally pal, I am glad that you raised this thread in the operating systems forum, after all, my hardware never goes wrong?

:p :D :lildevil: