Need a hand please lads

Zero

Gotta a weird problem here with me 'puter.

Its a 266->400MHz Celeron with 64megs of PC100 ram. Now, that shouldnt present any problems with playing Quake. But the odd time, Quake completely slows down to about 12fps, when the connect and pl are fine.
I thought it was the windows swap file and when i checked i hadnt one (doh, new machine), so I made one with 100megs. theres still 50 megs free on the C drive, and 50 on the D, where Quake is.
The chip isnt overheating, it makes no difference when its reset to 266, and Quake is acting the bollix, but only sometimes.
Is this a software or hardware problem, does anyone know???

Zero, who can normally sort this kinda sh!te out but hasnt a clue with this one.

SB

Here Zero I have the same problem from time to time. I have a TNT and lots of RAM and a P24xx and now and then I was getting real **** performance from QLQuake. After a few of these lag trips I alt+tab'd back to windows to see what was going on and there was this program running entitled "Rearangeing files so programs start faster" U know like a defrag So I guess that could be the problem u'r having. I didnt launch the program and am still looking for some way to stop it happening.

SickBoy... Who forgot his password

FreaK_BrutheR

In ure start up folder there's prolly a thing that u get with Office 97 that opens when ure computer is deemed idle. Quake is an idle man's game so.... Cant mind the name of it but i had to take it outta there as the same thing was happening me. hope thith hath been of thome thort of athithtanth.

Von

Sounds like Find Fast.

Jaden

I get this aswell. It happens after I've been playing a while, Von, how do you stop it???

DeVore

To stop it open up your Start menu,
Go to Settings --> Taskbar & Start Menu
Click on the Start Menu Programs.
Click on Advanced.
Find the Startup group and open it.
Look for a file named Find Fast and delete it.
"OK" your way back to the desk top.

DeV.
PS: it bugged me silly for a while but it has to do with how windows determines idleness.

Creed

If it's Win98 you might have Defrag scheduled in the Maintenance wizard. Just reset the rules to summat a wee bit better.
(As far as I know Findfast doesn't defrag just keeps a handy databse of regularly accessed d-base files, but it's useless so worth getting rid of anyway)

Hobbes

Is it single player or multiplayer? Is it network or modem? Did you know NetBus/BO will cause it to slow down. Do a NETSTAT -a when it happens and check to see what's going in and out of the machine network.

Could be line noise? Low memory? I'm sure you thought of these... maybe your stoned at the time <IMG SRC="http://lacerta.ucg.ie/boards/smile.gif&quot; WIDTH=15 HEIGHT=15 BORDER=0 ALT=":)">

Zero

thats the thing, when it starts, it does it in single player too. its not netbus or bo either, i have all that checked. nothin runnin in the background either. right fu@ked up it is.
when i installed win98 instead of 95, it happened before, on my last machine, everything was fine except quake, same happened to OL once too. thing is, i dunno how well win95 will handle the abit board chipset n stuff or i'd put it back on

Hobbes

I get this a bit on and off on Win98. The problem is that while memory cleans up when I close a program, the graphics memory doesn't. So if I open and close the game a lot or shut it down and open it again a lot, it happens where it takes 2 minutes to get into the game and the fps goes to something .001

Try launching the resource meter (NT = taskmanager) and watching the levels of the GDI memory.

Dunno if that will help. The only other things is maybe you have a virus checker set to active checking, so when Quake goes to cache some of the game to disk the virus checker kic..... wait I have another idea. It could be Powersave feature on the harddrive. If it's on and Quake goes to cache to the harddrive you can end up stalling for about 10-20 seconds.

Anyway without seeing the problem I can't guess that well. Hope that helps.