Bad lag on new laptop

Eggy Baby!

Hey guys,

I purchased a new laptop, which arrived only a few days ago. Here are the specs:

Windows 7 64 Bit
Dell Model N5110
Intel core i3-2350M Cpu @ 2.3GHz 2.3GHz
4.00GB RAM
Nvidia Geforce GT 525M 1GB video card
640GB Hard Drive

I was trying to play Arma 2 on it yesterday and the lag was unbearable. I made a simple situation in the editor. I placed a single soldier on Utes island. I turned all the graphics down to low and the resolution to 800x600. The frames barely hit 20 fps. MY old computer could run that pretty easily. My 8 year old desktop with less RAM, less video card memory, Windows XP and a single core Pentium 4 could run that situation better on medium graphics and a higher resolution.

Needless to say, I was pissed off. So I went onto System Requirements Lab to see why. My laptop, I found, was actually closer to the recommended requirements of ArmA 2 than my desktop was. Yet it could run the game at 10% of my desktop's average.

I've noticed that in other situations, my laptop is very slow also. It takes about 20+ seconds to load after I log in. My desktop is noticeably faster despite being very old. I have reduced the number of crap programs on startup and reverted the theme to Windows 7 basic (to reduce how much memory dwm.exe hogs) yet these things haven't made a difference.

Any help in rectifying these problems would be appreciated!

CreepingDeath

Laptop versions of graphics cards can be cut down versions of the desktop versions. I'd say update your graphics drivers to start with and the latest game patches too.


I've a Quad-Core desktop running Win 7 64-bit but have noticed lags too on simple tasks like opening Windows Explorer windows to view folders.

So I
- removed/disabled the "Window Indexer" service.
- I suspected DropBox too and manually updated my version to the latest as it wasn't auto-updating and I was 5 versions behind.
- TortoiseSVN may be a problem too, if you use Subversion version control system for source code

Eggy Baby!

Even then, I Passmarked my graphics card and it was roughly on par with my desktop's video card. I noticed that when I increased the "Video Memory" settings in ArmA 2 there was a noticeable increase in playability, but it was still very poor.

It feels like the game is using only one core or something. I can't quite put my finger on it.

Jarren

Try tweaking with it

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?85124-ArmA2-OA-%28low%29-performance-issues&p=2081466#post2081466

PogMoThoin

Defragment, Arma 2 is very hard drive intensive.

Eggy Baby!

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Defragment, Arma 2 is very hard drive intensive.

I defragged twice in the last few days but its no better unfortunately.

PogMoThoin

Part of the problem could be that you're running Windows on the same drive as the game. Remember the drive is only 5400RPM, a lot slower than the 7200RPM desktop ones. Arma 2 is not like other games, it is very cpu and hard drive intensive, not so hard on the gpu.