What's the deal with these slowdowns in games?

[imported_GrdLock]

I just recently built myself a mostly new computer.

Athlon XP 3200 400Mhz
512MB PC3200
GeForce 4200 Ti 128MB
SB Audigy LS
200GB serial ATA hard drive

The GeForce and Audigy were out of my old computer. I first noticed it with Medal of Honor Pacific Assault, that when playing the game it lagged quite a bit, as if it was running short of memory and having to load stuff often from the hard drive, slowing the game down. The framerate is fine when it's not lagging from the loading. So I went and bought another 512MB of ram, bringing it up to 1GB. I still notice the slowdowns, just not as much.

Now I just got Half Life 2 in today, been waiting on it forever! The laggy parts happen in HL2 as well! What could be causing this!? I'd think 1GB of ram is plenty.

Anyone have any suggestions on what I can do to fix this laggy problem in these games? I'm thinking about buying one of the GeForce 6600GT AGP cards when they get more widespread in stores, as they just came out today no stores around here seem to have any in yet. I wanna play HL2 NOW though.

 

[tk11]

If the drive is running during the slowdowns then find out what application is accessing the drive (it's probably not the game). Also make sure dma is enabled on your drive(control panel>system>device manager>drive>properties). To eliminate the video card as the bottleneck you can reduce the resolution to the lowest setting and set all detail levels at the lowest settings. It'll look like crap but if the stutter dissapears then changing your video card or drivers may get rid of your problem, if not then look elsewhere for the solution.

 

[ThePiston]

Do a virus scan and spyware scan... ctrl-alt-del and see what's taking up your CPU sycles... sounds like something you don't want running is running. Also, type msconfig in Run... and uncheck al lthe crap in your start files.

 

[twilo]

I had some crazy lag playing simple games like Counter-Strike with my P4 2.4ghz, 1gig ram, Geforce4 ti4600 128mb. Couldn't figure out why it was lagging so hard at certain times.

I nuked the system and reinstalled clean, then everything was fine. Sometimes it's software trouble like corrupted video drivers or what not. Either way you could always try it.