Slow MoFollow

I run eq on a laptop with 2gb of ram, running on vista. When i first got the laptop it ran 2 of my accounts very very well, with the exception of slightly slowed zoning times if I zoned both accounts at the sametime. No lag whatsoever.

It has been 6 months or so, and the performance is decreased abit, and now I lag quite often, in most cases its a "stop-lag" I have always run it with full spell effects, all models, showing full names, etc. I like running it with full options on, as this is what i have always done.

I play on a wireless connection, it is my connection, and most days theres only 2 comps on the network. It is the same connection that I played on when i first got the laptop. First question is this..Is there a setting, a function, or task of some sort that will help me fix the lag issue (sans reimaging the drive)?

Second issue, when i run the second account (mostly) there are often moments where everything slows down, like a super-slowmotion. Its not a lag, I dont stop or sputter like you do when you lag. I actually slow down ( which is a pain when trying to run at bard speed).

I installed a game on the computer, it was a "need for speed" racing game and in the game it did a slowmo occasionally for whatever reason. Since I installed that game ( game has been uninstalled) I have had the slowmo problem. Did that game do something to my graphics driver or something? If so, how do I fix it? ( again I dont really want to reimage the drive)

Sorry for the length, but I greatly appreciate any help.

Are you still playing in the same zones? The more recent expansion you are playing in requires more computer power (more RAM for example).

Edited, Oct 28th 2009 7:15pm by Boomsticker

Maybe it's time to look at a couple things:

Make sure you have available free hard drive space on the drive where both EQ is installed and the drive where Windows is installed

Alt-tab out of EQ while it's running and do a ctrl-alt-del to pull up the task manager. Sort the list by CPU consumption (click twice on "CPU") and see if there is something else running and sucking CPU cycles while you're playing. It's windows, so look for antivirus, anti-spyware, and or virus & spyware. Even Yahoo messenger and Skype can freak out and go into endless loops and take your computer performance down with them.

Defrag your hard drives. Run a full virus and spyware scan. Clean out your msconfig startup tab to only load programs you need.

Check if EQ runs ok on your network from another computer (if this is an option).

Good luck.

Heat and the things Sam mentioned are you're most likely culprits. Other things you should check, is large log files in your everquest\logs directory and journal files in your everquest\userdata directory.

If none of the other suggestions help, then try re-installing your video driver, and DirectX. The video driver installation is most likely on your hard drive somewhere already, and DirectX you can download from microsoft.com. This only sounds likely due to the installation of the Need for Speed, which may have modified your DirectX files.

Yther Ore.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2da43d38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3&displaylang=en

DirectX 9.0c

There's 10 also, but I'm not sure if EQ is compatible with 10, it should be though.

Yther Ore.

Here's a system monitor app:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Info/Motherboard-Monitor.shtml

If you don't like it or can't figure out what sensors to set to what, you can probably do a search for "cpu temperature monitor" or "hardware monitor" to find others.

Yther Ore.