I figured there might be some gurus here that can solve my problem.
I have an Athalon 2000 cpu, 512 megs of ram, and a G4 4200 card, running windows XP with the latest SP installed.
Using warcraft III as an example, but by no means is the only game that has this problem:
I load the game, and goto Bnet, and find and join a game, and then the game starts.
Then usually in about 1 minute, the game freezes up and my HDD light is on, while my drive goes crazy, this lasts for about 10 seconds sometimes. Then the game ‘catches up’ with time going really fast. Sometimes during the same game session this will happen a second time for a shorter length. One place if frequently, but not always happens, is when my Hero pops out of the Altar for the first time.
Typically if I play more sessions this doesnt happen, but I can’t be sure. However, if I exit WCIII and reload it, it definitly will happen.
This is incredibly annoying. I am not sure what is going on, but I have tried messing with my virtual memory a few times, finally locking it at a fixed sized of 400 megs. No one seems to know what causes this and how to fix it.
Another symptom that may or may not be related, is after I close an app that uses a huge amount of memory, and even if I wait seveal minutes, the next app I load takes forever. Like It can take outlook 3 minutes to load even if after a fresh boot outlook only takes 5 seconds to load. Even opening a window to a directory can take minutes.
You think that is the same problem? I would assume a game would allocate memory before gameplay starts, not during gameplay. But perhaps this is it. Ill get the new DirectX and then ill add the hotfix and see.
XPs defragger sucks. I checked my c: drive, 4 gigs, 3 gigs in use, and badly fragmented. I ran the defragger 3 times, and it is still badly fragemented.
Also, this hotfix didnt fix the problem of having a huge delay in the ability to load another app after a previous memory hog app had exited, even if I wanted for a few minutes. Still havent seen if it fixes the warcraft problem because I am still playing zelda.
Gotta buy Diskeeper 7 Second Edition from ExecSoftware. It’s the full-featured, big brother to XP’s defrag (MS just licensed a stripped-down version of Diskeeper for the default defrag program). Get big brother, though, and you’ll be taken care of.
You know, I don’t have any problems with XP’s default defragger at all.
I mean, the graph has my data spread around on my drive, but the files aren’t actually fragmented.
And I don’t want all my data in one contiguous block at the start of my drive. Then when a program wants to add new data, it can’t do it right next to its other data, it has to do it way off in some other part of the drive.
DeepT, are when you say your drive is still fragmented, are you referring to actually referring to looking at the report after doing an analyze or degragment and seeing files with fragments? Or do you just mean that the blue/red/green bar has blue and green lines scattered around? Because that doesn’t mean your drive is fragmented, merely that it’s data is not contiguous. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
