All round gaming performance issue

[blackram]

Greetings all,

After reformatting my hard disk and reinstalling Windows XP this weekend, I have found that my games no longer run to a quality level of performance. Whenever I open a game (examples being America's Army, Medieval II Total War, F.E.A.R etc) right from the opening videos the performance is choppy with a freeze ever few seconds, jolting the sound and video from any sort of smooth motion.

This is not your usual choppy frame rate, but rather an all round performance issue where the games freeze every few seconds and are virtually unplayable.

I am running an:
AMD Athlon 2400+
Radeon 9700 128mb Pro
1GB of RAM
2X110 SATA hard disks configured in RAID, partitioned in C: = 8GB for windows only and D: = 212GB for all apps, media, docs etc.

I have installed all drivers, direct x, etc and done the usual disable programs before playing and what not. Defragmented both partitions. Downloaded and installed everything from Windows Update also, so everything should be 100% up to date.

So does anyone have any suggestions for fixing this?

Note, the games used to run silky smooth about a week ago, so it is not a hardware incompatibility issue or whatever

and also, I experienced this very problem about two months back, and found it attributed to some heating issues. I replaced my thermal paste and as such cooled everything down to acceptable temps. Currently, the temps are still at an acceptable level.

Thanks in advance

[mrpresident]

I have the very same problem, EXACTLY as you describe it. When i try to play any of my games (halo, max payne, vampire the masquerade bloodlines) the games freeze and pause every few seconds, for a couple of seconds. I also hear weird noises from the computer when trying to play the game but im not sure if its a beep or something else.

These games used to run silky smooth, as you say. The problem started when i had to replace my psu because the last one messed up (screen wouldn't come on at all, fans were still spinning but i knew computer wasn't booting because no sounds could be heard.) Anyway i bought another psu which seemed to fix everything. However, now i am experiencing the pauses in the game which make it unbearable to try and play.

I got errors in my event viewer last time i tried to play.

event id 2004, which i had 3 off.
The Performance registry value Counter 009 string is corrupted. Skip string \"Ꙡ苼瀠节\".
The Performance registry value Counter 009 string is corrupted. Skip string \"ᦚ
HALO.EXE\".
The Performance registry value Counter 009 string is corrupted. Skip string \"䍓䅃\".


EventID 3001, which i had 2 off:
The performance counter name string value in the registry is incorrectly formatted. The bogus string is , the bogus index value is the first DWORD in Data section while the last valid index values are the second and third DWORD in Data section.

I also had event id error 3011:
Unloading the performance counter strings for service WmiApRpl (WmiApRpl) failed. The Error code is the first DWORD in Data section.

in the SYSTEM TAB i had disk errors id=51. "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation." But i don't feel its the hard drive that's causing the problem as ive ran chkdsk a few times and it didnt have errors.



(oh yeah I took the whole comp apart while trying to replace my psu, then built it again form scratch. Ive tried putting the gfx card on its own 12v rail, and ive tried reseating graphics card (9800pro).


PLEASE can someone help with this problem.


To the OP: sorry i couldn't help you, but hopefully someone will come along and tell us how to fix this issue. My cpu temps are also fine (under 50 Celsius)

[mrpresident]

To the original poster,

Check your event viewer, control Panel>admin tool>event viewer
I bet that under the system tab you have yellow warning triangles representing event id 51 errors. (scroll down if there's none at the top)

every time the system does that pause/freeze thing, it generates one of these errors. this error appears to be due to the hard drive. but i don't think there's anything wrong with my drive, and neither do many other people experiencing this problem (well thats what im finding after hours on the internet tryna find a fix)


let me know if you are getting those warnings in your event viewer.

[mrpresident]

whats a guy gotta do to get some replies around here?

[ProfessorU]

Wait, mostly.

It can't hurt to try playing with the page file. I would try disabling it, restarting, and enabling it again, at a fixed size. That should defrag it.

Here's my list of possible options... we need to narrow this down.
intermittent power voltage problems
heat problems (probably vid card but proc and HD could be culprits)
driver problems (be sure you didn't install a beta driver)
dodgy hardware (like a failing NIC)
Too many processes running (run a HJT log for us)