PCTech Forums

Hello all,
Sorry, I'm new here, not sure about etiquette, etc. Bear with me, please!
My computer (Windows XP) has been acting quite strange recently.

When I'm loading a level of a game (f.e. COD4, LEGO Pirates (to a lesser extent), Medal Of Honor: Pacific Assault, etc.), not the game itself, the level loading screen's video and/or audio become extremely choppy, my FPS drops from 30-40 down to 9-12, and the level takes far too long to load. Where, for my friend with a very similar computer, it takes 15 seconds, it takes me 3-5 minutes.

I've tried turning off my anti-viruses (Avira and ZoneAlarm, both free) and updating the drivers (no help).

Here are my PC's specs:
Dell Optiplex GX280 running XP
Pentium 4 Processor (3GHz)
3070MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS (1GB)
SoundMax Digital Audio
And the pagefile is 707 MB used, 4248 MB available

Does anybody know how to solve this? I'm kind of in the dark myself.

Thanks!
Joetumlin

P.S. My computer also insists, on every bootup, to do a checkdisk of my secondary (D) drive. Takes a while if you forget to hang around and skip it... I have let it run several times, too. Thanks!

Welcome to pctech Joe, i hope i can help a little.
Normally these slow load times come down to memory or slow hdd and in your case i lean toward hdd speed or clutter. If you havent done so recently, a good defrag (preferably in safe mode) can help things quite a bit. I always suggest safe mode so you have the least amount of files in use as active files wont be moved and active programs tend to reset the defrag process. You can swing through and run their free test to see if all your hardware is acting as it should. You can run it anonymously or create a free account and it will save your test to compare to later ones. You must be in IE, it dont like firefox. I would start there and lets see where the bottleneck is, once we find that we can determine which way to go from there.

Alright, will do.

P.S. I did the pcpitstop test. Found 25 things I could optimize. Will work on them. Let you know results in a few days(defrags are loooooong)...

OK, managed to lower the problems to 12 Fixes, and defragmented, but still does it.

Here's the list of things:

Test Area Test Name Scan Result Recommended
Junk Files Old Patch Uninstallers 300.96 MB 50 MB

Internet HTTP Internet Settings Unoptimized Optimized

Internet TCP Internet Settings Unoptimized Optimized

Internet dns_settings Unoptimized Optimized

Internet afd_settings Unoptimized Optimized

Startup Programs Intel(R) Common User Interface Enabled Disabled

Startup Programs Intel(R) Common User Interface Enabled Disabled

Disk Data Fragmentation 19.26% 10%

Other Services Test Automatic

Other Services Test Automatic

Other Services Test Automatic

Advice System Restore Capacity 9,148 MB 1024 MB

Not sure how to fix this stuff, did my best though!

Also, ran a chkdisk, and the continual blue screen checkdisk at startup is gone.