Computer running slow

[Patr1ck]

I agree with what Benji said. Sounds like a hardware problem.

You say the entire game is lagging behind by about one second? Is this constant or does it happen every few seconds like a lag spike.
I had the pause every few seconds and it turned out to be my keyboard driver was installed twice. I disabled one of the drivers in the device manager and the pauses went away.

Could be your memory, too. If you have multiple sticks of memory in your computer, troubleshoot them by removing one of them, then the other(s). It could be a bad stick, a bad slot, so try different slots and sticks.

Check your cpu and memory. http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html Does everything look in line?
Check your temperatures. It could just be some overheating, but probably not since that usually causes crashes, blue screens and artifacts, not persistent lag. http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html Better safe than sorry.

Hard drive failure/problems due to bad sectors and the drive trying to read them. I had a hard drive from my old computer that I put in my current one. A few months ago I would hear an intermittent noise when the particular drive would try to read some files that were in the bad sectors. I couldn't open this one directory until I ran the chkdsk and most of my files were recovered.

Have you installed anything that likes to check the internet or any new antivirus or malware/firewall program lately? Any system or graphics optimization program? Did you add any new hardware to the system like a mouse or keyboard? Did you change any USB slots for your accessories?

Basically, start unplugging things you don't necessarily need for 2K11, run it and see if the problem persists. If it doesn't, start plugging them in one at a time while running the game each time.

[koberulz]

Just reinstalled Windows, and seem to have fixed the problem. It's running smoother than I can ever remember it running.

EDIT: How do I change drive letters? D is now F, E is D, F is E, I is G...

[NovU]

EDIT: How do I change drive letters? D is now F, E is D, F is E, I is G...

If I remember correctly, you could do it easily in Disk Management Tools that comes with your Windows.

BTW, which Windows did you install? Vista is known to pile up the junks and slow down as the time goes by. I believe that was the biggest drawback with the Vista other than a few noticeable errors. Windows 7 on the other is known to be the exact same OS as Vista but only with all those issues fixed.

[benji]

But the consensus just seemed that Vista was absolutely horrible

Consensus of morons who basically went along with what "they heard" until Vista turned into this evil monster worse than ME rather than the huge upgrade over XP it is.

Just reinstalled Windows, and seem to have fixed the problem. It's running smoother than I can ever remember it running.

EDIT: How do I change drive letters? D is now F, E is D, F is E, I is G...

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/wind ... ive-letter

Vista is known to pile up the junks and slow down as the time goes by. I believe that was the biggest drawback with the Vista other than a few noticeable errors. Windows 7 on the other is known to be the exact same OS as Vista but only with all those issues fixed.

No, that's all Windows versions, it is inherent in the core design and why they wanted to change the File System. But computing power increased enough they scrapped it due to the development problems. Vista was where they introduced a huge array of self-cleanup, 7 isn't significantly better than Vista at it. Both are massive steps beyond XP. 7, like 8 will be, was more about UI changes and tweaks under the hood than a huge code overhaul. That's why Vista and Office 2007 took so much longer to release.

7 will pile up "the junks" and "slow down" just as much as all the other Windows have the longer it is installed. That's why they say to format and do fresh installs once a year if you can for best performance.

If you have Vista, there's no reason not to just wait for 8 next year if you want to upgrade unless you're building a new machine.

[NovU]

I don't really know deep details beyond Vista and 7 story but from my personal experience it was a huge upgrade coming from Vista to 7. Now I reset the computer much less(actually rarely/never) from the errors and no slow ups that much compared to the beggining of fresh installation unlike Vista. Overall the upgrade I felt was well worth it and I've never had to reinstall 7 so far on my Quadcore gaming system. From appz to games, the computer seems to be as fast as before with no errors. With Vista, I remember constantly battling for lost speed and bugs like koberulz has.

[benji]

Did you change computers or just operating systems?

Because there's no factual basis behind any significant performance differences between Vista and 7. You should never be "battling for lost speed" on either.

[NovU]

Just the operating systems.

I am guessing the lost speed was due to the bugs here and there in Vista whereas 7 is pretty much the same OS with updates. I reinstalled Vista once or twice before switching to 7 and I am still using that 7 at the moment without problems. Couple of my friends and I shared the same experience where 7 gave overall superior performance so I think there definitely was a reason why the Vista was called the worst operating system ever. People were reluctant to swtich from XP to Vista, while people had generally a better experience with 7 even compared to the XP.

[benji]

I think there definitely was a reason why the Vista was called the worst operating system ever.

Yeah, it's called FUD. Followed by a bunch of morons repeating it over and over until it becomes the "truth."

Many of the computer manufacturer's did not help things by selling under-RAMed machines at launch. And far too many hardware companies didn't have their drivers ready.

[Andrew]

Many of the computer manufacturer's did not help things by selling under-RAMed machines at launch.

That happened with XP, too. I've seen a lot of PCs over the years running XP with only 256 MB of RAM (or less!), which seems like a ridiculous place to cut costs given how cheap RAM is.

[Patr1ck]

Since we are now discussing OS versions, should I upgrade to 7? Install with dual boot? Possible to upgrade XP and keep as much as possible?

[Andrew]

7's pretty good about making use of XP drivers, if need be.

[NovU]

Having read benji's posts, perhaps Vista was misunderstood by many.

But it was bit too buggy and slow for my taste.

As for Pdub. I don't think it'd hurt to go to 7 unless your computer is old as hell that it can only sufficiently run XP. But dual boot is always a sure go if u aren't sure about 7 yet.

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/ ... -xp-615167

To find out, we decided to test each operating system's performance on an average PC. The system is nothing particularly special by today's standards, consisting of an Intel dual-core E5200 CPU, 2GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon HD4550 graphics card. We installed XP, Vista and Windows 7 in that order (all 32-bit versions) on the machine's 500GB hard drive and ran a number of real-world benchmarks to find out which OS was best.

The boot time test provided no surprises – Vista took the longest time to get started, XP came in second place and Windows 7 was the fastest.

At first it seemed like our file transfer benchmarks would deliver the same results. Vista produced poor copy speeds in our small file tests, XP again placed second and Windows 7 came out on top. But when we tried transferring larger 1GB files, Vista surprisingly just managed to win out over XP. Both were beaten by the speedy Windows 7, though.

This proved true for our application tests as well. Open a small Excel spreadsheet or PDF file, say, and XP beats Vista, but heavy-duty spreadsheets and PDF files opened faster under Vista than XP. Once again, however, both were trounced by the newcomer.

You might have spotted the theme here. Windows 7 delivered excellent results, beating or coming close to the performance of the lightweight XP in just about every category. It's quite remarkable given that this is an operating system still in beta. When all the drivers are fully finished, we should see even better performance.

If we'd run the benchmarks on a less powerful PC, perhaps one with only 1GB of RAM, then it's possible that Windows XP would have fared better than it did here. But for even a fairly basic modern PC, Windows 7 delivers the best performance around.

[koberulz]

The game runs fine, but it's running full screen, which distorts the scoreboard. I had it running at a resolution last time where it had black bars top and bottom, and thus the scoreboard was the right shape. This time, instead of adding black bars, it's just stretching it out so everything is distorted instead. What is it that's likely to be different?

[benji]

Possible to upgrade XP and keep as much as possible?

No, there are no upgrade paths to 7.

If you aren't having issues, just wait a year for 8.

But it was bit too buggy and slow for my taste.

Yeah, I'm sure.

lol at referencing an article using beta software and 32-bit versions. Even worse with none of the benchmarks properly described or repeatable, irrelevant margins of error, nor ANY listing of the drivers and versions of anything used. When more respectable but still flawed benchmarking methods are used, Vista and 7 crush XP but are almost identical with a slight advantage to 7 as it should be. XP should really never be outperforming either in serious benchmarks.

[Patr1ck]

Only issue I have is that I can't play just cause 2 without the newer dx version, but I guess that can wait.

[shadowgrin]

The game runs fine, but it's running full screen, which distorts the scoreboard. I had it running at a resolution last time where it had black bars top and bottom, and thus the scoreboard was the right shape. This time, instead of adding black bars, it's just stretching it out so everything is distorted instead. What is it that's likely to be different?

Scaling.
I don't know what brand your video card is so I'll just post a general way to get there.
Right click on your desktop, click Personalize, click Display Settings, click Advanced Settings, then and fiddle around with the tabs to access your video card's control panel. Most likely it's in the tab that has the ati or nvidia logo. Fiddle some more to find where you can change the scaling options (centered, full screen, etc.)

If your videocard is ati, you can just right click on your desktop and select the catalyst control center. Then fiddle with some tabs to find the scaling options. It's probably the same with nvidia too, right click on desktop and you'll probably see an nvidia logo to change your graphics options and find the scaling options.

[koberulz]

That did the trick. Thanks.

[Andrew]

I don't think it'd hurt to go to 7 unless your computer is old as hell that it can only sufficiently run XP.

In my experience, 7 actually runs pretty well on older machines that were built for XP...so long as they're not just scraping in the minimum requirements to run XP efficiently in the first place. That said I'm actually still running XP, it gets the job done and I'd rather not fork out the money for an upgrade at this time.

[koberulz]

...and now I'm getting the 'display driver stopped responding and has recovered' error. The most recent drivers weren't even that nice to me, they just shut the display off completely forcing me to reboot. I rolled back to the drivers on the disc that came with the computer, and now I'm getting the error, which also causes whatever program I'm using at the time to stop responding.

On my last install, I had a version of the drivers that prevented any display problems at all. No idea how to get it back. Don't even know which version it was.

It's an nVidia 9500 GT.

[Andrew]

Older drives should still be available on the nVidia site. Do you recall the last time you updated the driver before reinstalling Windows? You could look at the versions that were released around about that time and give them a shot.

[koberulz]

Not a clue. Though I do remember posting about it somewhere.

A C++ Runtime error just crashed Photoshop, and now it won't run. Starting to think maybe 2k11 wasn't worth this hassle.

[koberulz]

Found it. It was installing, popped up something about not being able to find a DLL, and is now stuck.

EDIT: Turns out it was asking confirmation to overwrite the newer version, but instead of popping up, the message was under the installer. Got it working now.

[koberulz]

It hasn't helped, though. Still getting the display driver error. And Windows just got me the new Messenger for some reason, so I'm trying to figure out what the fuck everything is whilst the screen is going blank every few seconds forcing me to exit the program and reopen it.

EDIT: Okay, it's killing Messenger every time it happens (which is often), regardless of whether I'm using it or it's just sitting there minimised. Fuck.

[NovU]

Lolz, koberulz. That's a lot of trouble you're dealing with over one game.

In my experience, 7 actually runs pretty well on older machines that were built for XP...so long as they're not just scraping in the minimum requirements to run XP efficiently in the first place. That said I'm actually still running XP, it gets the job done and I'd rather not fork out the money for an upgrade at this time.

Agreed. And yeah, that's what I meant, as minimum requirement for 7 is higher than XP so unless the comp doesn't meet the requirement of 7, I think the comp should run faster on 7 than XP.

I have an Atom Netbook with relatively slow CPU and only 1GB Ram, and it came with XP installed. The computer is slow as hell and I only used it to take notes during the lecutre. One day, prof recommended me to get 7 on it as it might become bit faster to load and close programs. I still kept XP as I didn't want to deal with all the works to back up and stuff, but it seems general perception is 7 is much faster than XP in general for all PCs.

[koberulz]

Upgraded the driver again, thinking perhaps it was the next one, but no. Still a problem. So now I'm going to downgrade to the driver prior to the one I had installed before I upgraded to this one. Why the most recent drivers can't just work is beyond me; normally upgrading improves performance instead of preventing it. nVidia is fucking stupid.