Prepping PC for new Video Games

Hi,

As of late my system has been very laggy in all aspects. I have done a ton of adaware and virus scans and everything has been cleaned out. My DVD drive has this weird problem where it wont play DVD's, Game CD's or Audio CD's correctly. It will skip on the audio and video, which makes my video games lag out. Here is my current Config:

Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (build 2600)

2.08 gigahertz AMD Athlon XP 2800+

HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM GDR8160B

Maxtor 6 Y080M0 SATA Disk Device (81.96 GB) -- drive 1

SAMSUNG SV2042H [iDE Hard drive] (20.41 GB) -- drive 0

768 Megabytes Installed Memory

MSI Geforce Fx5950XT Video Card (on the way, currently have Fx5200)

Im trying to get ready for games like Batlefield 2. I dont need to run them at full power, but I need them to be relatively smoothe. How can I refine my system to make games run faster and better? Are there any programs I could run to make my system faster, a defgrag, full system OS Reinstall, or a Raid 0 configuration between two raid drives? Somebody told me that makes the system like 20X faster.

Please help, my games cant lag now, not when all the good games are coming out! I think i have a fairly decent setup.

Thanks,

Pops

#275995

Best bet is reformat. Unless it's a hardware video card problem, it's basically a panacea. Try to keep it clean after that, and make sure you update all your drivers.

-NC

#275997

Ive heard to reinstall windows every 4 months, to keep it clean. but i have so much data, guess i'll just put it all on the trusty imac

#275998

There's no need to re-install Windows every 4 months or at all for that matter.

That is possibly the most obsured comment I have ever heard about WIndows XP.

Patch it regualrly, perform REGULAR maintanance (defrag, regclean, bootvis every once and a while, etc.)

Run a REAL anti-virus program and have a decent firewall... hardware and or software based.

I have been running from the same install of XP for almost 2 years on my home system.

Even when I upgraded my motherboard and a ton of other hardware, there was no need to reinstall.

Just updated the drivers and cleaned out the old stuff.

It still runs like a dream because I perform the above mentioned on a regular basis.

Even our precious Mac's will start to run like crap if we don't take care of them properly.

#276001

if your getting lag from the cd spinning up + dvd hardware probs. do 2 things:

1. Make sure to do full install of the game (not partial).

2. Find a no-cd patch (sometimes called a crack) for that game.

virus/spyware scan the crack before you use it.

#2 is perfectly legal in most countries without dmca style legislation, since you own the game anyways. If its illegal in your country, this post isn't my responsibility, since its legal in mine.

Alternatively, you can rip an iso of the game, mount it as a virtual cd with daemon tools, and most games will happily verify authenticity from your hard drive. Takes hd space and may not work with some occassional, extremely recent cd security.

edit: you should know if its legal since you're Sheriff John Bunnell

#276007

get a new dvd drive... maybe the lens is faulty

#276009

I reformat my computer weekly... that REALLY keeps the clutter down

#276238

@rjohnstone: I ran the same XP installation for 3 years straight doing what you did (regular, extreme maintenence and lots of protection), and I considered it really slick. However, I changed from XP Home to XP Pro, and it wasn't until then that I realized that my XP Home wasn't really running like a dream at all, but I'd grown so used to the system gradually slowing down over the years that I hadn't noticed it.

#276362