Hard Drive Problem

[Reckoner]

In the Software/Gaming Section I posted about having freeze problems with Rome: Total War. It appears I'm having the same problems in other games as well. It seems like in any highly intensive game situations the game will either freeze or CTD. Even after changing my AMD 64 3000+ back down to stock levels, I experience these problems. It seems like the Hard Drive is always working extremely hard, and is contributing to these pauses and freezes. CPU Temp is only 34C, and the GPU is at 68C during gaming. Any help on this would be appreciated.

 

[mortoma]

With 1gb of RAM, in most games your computer should not have to access the HD at all!! The program code itself and all the sound and video data should be loading into the RAM when the game first loads, no further access of the HD should be needed in most cases, with most games. Sounds like you have a lot or perhaps a ton of background programs running when you play a game, and those programs are using too much of your RAM. To help for now, you might try increasing the size of the swap file. But you should also try and reduce the unnecessary stuff in the task manager. I don't even run my anti-virus when I play a game. Do a lot of things/icons show down in your sys tray?? You might also pay a visit to www.blackviper.com to see how to further tweak things. There are also "services" that run in XP and blackviper shows how to reduce those to only the ones that are needed. XP has to be tweaked a lot to reduce it's RAM footprint, which is huge and much larger than older OSs like ME and 95/98. Some type of RAM manger utiliity may help too but I can't think of the names of any right now except Cacheman, which can be found at www.outertech.com. May be worth a try.