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New video card, ram, or hard drive?Follow
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Hi all! I have been noticing the last few months playing eq that I get laggier and laggier. I've had to turn off all luclin models, advanced lighting, shaders, particle effects, etc. What would help the situation more? A new video card, hard drive, or more ram? (1 gig now)
1) Check and see if your harddrive has 10% + free space, all programs run better with at least 10% of harddrive empty, its windows swap drive thing I believe. At the very least, you can't do step 7 with less than 10% free space. If you do not have 10% free, then remove some old game demos to help make room, we all know you have them. =)
2) Run Ad Aware, as adware programs slow down your comp and use memory, even when blocked by a popup blocker.
3) Run Spybot Search and Destroy , also includes a utitly to see your startup programs and turn off unwanted ones that have crept into your startup and use up memory. Microsoft, Quicktime and AOL love to stick a few in there. Catches things Adaware might miss.
4) Run an anitviral, I use mcaffee free from AOL for continuous anitviral and also Panda Activescan web based antiviral for once a month in case mcaffe misses something; plus being web based, a virus can't corrupt it, which can happen especially with a couple of nasty ad pop ups d/l programs that turn off macaffe and other anitviral.
5) Then clean out your c:/temp and c:/windows/temp folders of abandoned temp files and temp folders, leave the basics, ie Cookies, history, temp internet files, adobe, etc based on your software. This can slow down windows and use memory.
6) Check your desktop, through windows explorer for each user's folder in documents and settings and all user folders, it will give you a list of all the stuff on your desktop including size. make sure only shortcuts are there, my son slowed down my computer big time by downloading a game demo directly to the desktop. You can also check your startmenu and all subfolders for the same thing, though its hard to get a file here instead of a shortcut, much easierr to d/l something by mistake to the desktop.
7) Then defrag your harddrive, even if defragger says not needed, the defragger designer was not a gamer.
These steps always help when my comp runs high end games slow. I do this usually once a month.
Edited, Oct 30th 2006 at 7:26am PST by fhrugby
2) Run Ad Aware, as adware programs slow down your comp and use memory, even when blocked by a popup blocker.
3) Run Spybot Search and Destroy , also includes a utitly to see your startup programs and turn off unwanted ones that have crept into your startup and use up memory. Microsoft, Quicktime and AOL love to stick a few in there. Catches things Adaware might miss.
4) Run an anitviral, I use mcaffee free from AOL for continuous anitviral and also Panda Activescan web based antiviral for once a month in case mcaffe misses something; plus being web based, a virus can't corrupt it, which can happen especially with a couple of nasty ad pop ups d/l programs that turn off macaffe and other anitviral.
5) Then clean out your c:/temp and c:/windows/temp folders of abandoned temp files and temp folders, leave the basics, ie Cookies, history, temp internet files, adobe, etc based on your software. This can slow down windows and use memory.
6) Check your desktop, through windows explorer for each user's folder in documents and settings and all user folders, it will give you a list of all the stuff on your desktop including size. make sure only shortcuts are there, my son slowed down my computer big time by downloading a game demo directly to the desktop. You can also check your startmenu and all subfolders for the same thing, though its hard to get a file here instead of a shortcut, much easierr to d/l something by mistake to the desktop.
7) Then defrag your harddrive, even if defragger says not needed, the defragger designer was not a gamer.
These steps always help when my comp runs high end games slow. I do this usually once a month.
Edited, Oct 30th 2006 at 7:26am PST by fhrugby
Without knowing your computer specs, it is difficult to tell you what to do - the advice above is all sound and you should definitely try that. The fastest MAY be to just reformat your hard drive, and reinstall everything you need. Notice the 'need' in that sentence!
1 Gb RAM is enough - you won't get much of a performance increase by increasing that. You might want to get a new video card, but it obviously depends on what you have now. You can, however, get a card that will run EQ more or less lag free for ~$100. My mong-term favorite in the 'sufficient, but nothing more'-class is Nvidia's 6600GT. See if you can't pick up a used one, it's like it was made for EQ.
Good luck
1 Gb RAM is enough - you won't get much of a performance increase by increasing that. You might want to get a new video card, but it obviously depends on what you have now. You can, however, get a card that will run EQ more or less lag free for ~$100. My mong-term favorite in the 'sufficient, but nothing more'-class is Nvidia's 6600GT. See if you can't pick up a used one, it's like it was made for EQ.
Good luck
IT would have been helpful if you told us what you had. Really unless your boxing a bunch of accounts 1 gig is prob enough for eq1. More then likely its your video card that needs updated.
Hi
fhrugby the Sly wrote:
1) Check and see if your harddrive has 10% + free space, all programs run better with at least 10% of harddrive empty, its windows swap drive thing I believe. At the very least, you can't do step 7 with less than 10% free space. If you do not have 10% free, then remove some old game demos to help make room, we all know you have them. =)
2) Run Ad Aware, as adware programs slow down your comp and use memory, even when blocked by a popup blocker.
3) Run Spybot Search and Destroy , also includes a utitly to see your startup programs and turn off unwanted ones that have crept into your startup and use up memory. Microsoft, Quicktime and AOL love to stick a few in there. Catches things Adaware might miss.
4) Run an anitviral, I use mcaffee free from AOL for continuous anitviral and also Panda Activescan web based antiviral for once a month in case mcaffe misses something; plus being web based, a virus can't corrupt it, which can happen especially with a couple of nasty ad pop ups d/l programs that turn off macaffe and other anitviral.
5) Then clean out your c:/temp and c:/windows/temp folders of abandoned temp files and temp folders, leave the basics, ie Cookies, history, temp internet files, adobe, etc based on your software. This can slow down windows and use memory.
6) Check your desktop, through windows explorer for each user's folder in documents and settings and all user folders, it will give you a list of all the stuff on your desktop including size. make sure only shortcuts are there, my son slowed down my computer big time by downloading a game demo directly to the desktop. You can also check your startmenu and all subfolders for the same thing, though its hard to get a file here instead of a shortcut, much easierr to d/l something by mistake to the desktop.
7) Then defrag your harddrive, even if defragger says not needed, the defragger designer was not a gamer.
These steps always help when my comp runs high end games slow. I do this usually once a month.
Edited, Oct 30th 2006 at 7:26am PST by fhrugby
2) Run Ad Aware, as adware programs slow down your comp and use memory, even when blocked by a popup blocker.
3) Run Spybot Search and Destroy , also includes a utitly to see your startup programs and turn off unwanted ones that have crept into your startup and use up memory. Microsoft, Quicktime and AOL love to stick a few in there. Catches things Adaware might miss.
4) Run an anitviral, I use mcaffee free from AOL for continuous anitviral and also Panda Activescan web based antiviral for once a month in case mcaffe misses something; plus being web based, a virus can't corrupt it, which can happen especially with a couple of nasty ad pop ups d/l programs that turn off macaffe and other anitviral.
5) Then clean out your c:/temp and c:/windows/temp folders of abandoned temp files and temp folders, leave the basics, ie Cookies, history, temp internet files, adobe, etc based on your software. This can slow down windows and use memory.
6) Check your desktop, through windows explorer for each user's folder in documents and settings and all user folders, it will give you a list of all the stuff on your desktop including size. make sure only shortcuts are there, my son slowed down my computer big time by downloading a game demo directly to the desktop. You can also check your startmenu and all subfolders for the same thing, though its hard to get a file here instead of a shortcut, much easierr to d/l something by mistake to the desktop.
7) Then defrag your harddrive, even if defragger says not needed, the defragger designer was not a gamer.
These steps always help when my comp runs high end games slow. I do this usually once a month.
Edited, Oct 30th 2006 at 7:26am PST by fhrugby
great post, there are a few things ill add here to his good list.
1. also run Spywareblaster as this creates a black list preventing known malware companies from ever loading/saving data to your computer.
2. visit http://www.trendmicro.com for a live full system scan.
Invest in a program called Diskkepper. best defragger on the market. it will run you about $40 for the home user version, but oh so worth it. it is a set and forget as well as having a constant LIVE defrag tool that can be set.
as for what to buy to upgrade cant tell ya unless you tell us your system specs... post your dxdiag.txt here and we can look at that to help.
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