Help! I'm having DVD slowdowns and half-life problems!!!!! :(

[HappyFace]

I have a geforce 2 mx card in my new duron 650 machine (Going to overclock it soon) and am using the newest reference drivers from http://www.nvidia.com/.

DVD playback in WinDVD is either extremely choppy, or not even viewable! My half-life performance (both opengl and d3d) is extremely bad also... even at the lower resolution, 800x600 my framerate fluxuates very crazily and doesn't seem to get very far above 60 fps. Often it drops into the 20fps range, in firefights.. Other games with nice graphics, such as hitman47 and alice, run much better then half-life/cs! (Though hitman does slow down a bit in large firefights, it's still playable)

Does anyone know what might be wrong? Everything seems to work pretty nicely, besides the couple things discribed above. Any help is appreciated much!!

 

[hifimaster]

Make sure your components arent overheating.

 

[HappyFace]

Bios reports a CPU temp of 29 celcius and a system temp of 23..

 

[HappyFace]

That's not too hot, right??! Someone please help, if you can!

 

[HappyFace]

No one has any suggestions?!

 

[Mule]

Were you playing in 16bit before and now 32bit? Actually that doesn't make sense since HL is only in 16bit. Try using different drivers, maybe even some beta drivers, and if you're using beta drivers, then go back to official drivers.

 

[HappyFace]

I've tried a few different drivers, with different results.. problem is, all the results are not good at all! I think it's time to install my v3 2000, as it's worked much better for me. =|

 

[Mule]

I would try reformatting your hard drive, that might resolve the problem. The GeForce is much more powerful then the V3 so that might not be a wise choice.

 

[HappyFace]

Reformatting really would be a pain, as I just installed windows recently.. I'll try other things first, before resorting to drastic measures.. Thanks for the ideas though!

 

[rommel]

do you have dma ticked in teh properties/settings of the dvd rom drive....here are some things you can try as well just for better performance...manually force swap files to 150mb's do this set the virtual memory to user defined...minimum to 150mb and maximum to 170mb.
make sure the also enable dma on the hard drive.

in the bios settings

pci/vga palette snoop - disabled
video rom bios shadow - disabled
video ram shadow - disabled
c8000-dffff - all memory ranges should be disabled
agp aperature size- half your total memory...but you can try different settings to optimize this
video memory cache size - uc
pnp os installed - yes
assign irq to vga - yes
reasources controlled by - auto

also defrag your hard drive once a week and shutdown any unnecessary programs and tsr's so that there is as little in the system tray as possible....happy killin