Skuzzy, PID #???

[zorstorer]

Over the past year or so my computer would bog down until even the task manager took up to 5 minutes to load.  This would only happen about once a week so I paid it no mind.  Well this last time pissed me off and I started poking around in the task manager.  I noted the CPU idle line the PID # was 0 and it went up from there, usually ending around 1800 or so.  Well after this last lockup/slowdown I noticed the last few entries were in the 50000 range.  Any idea what that could mean?  I run Win2k pro with 1gig of ram, not sure I need to give more info as this is not a specific AH2 problem, just wondering about it and hoping the meister might know something

[NHawk]

PID (Process IDdentification) numbers are created each time a new process is started and automatically roll over when the maximum pid value is reached. So, you could only have 3 programs running with PID numbers like 190, 1043 and 50000. That number is really useless in itself unless you are killing processes by ID number.

What I'd be concerned about is how many processes are active. If your machine is bogging down, that's a pretty good indication that to many programs are running, or something is hogging resources. Or, something that you use frequently isn't releasing memory. Or you have a virus/spyware. I know, lots of "ors" but you haven't given much to go on.

By the way, having to reboot Win2K once a week isn't unusual. It was actually common in the server world. I don't know if it still is since I switched my servers to Fedora/Linux a long time ago.

[Clifra Jones]

1st off what you are describing is a classic symptom of a what we call a leaky program. Some process that is running on your system is not returning system memory or resources when is stops doing what it's supposed to do.

You should investigate and remove any non-critical programs or services that are running on your system and see how it performs.

With that in mind you should only be running the basic system processes needed to run windows and AH while playing this game. This should be around 12-14 processes depending on your system.

Here is an explanation on how to setup your PC for AH.
http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=150447&highlight=dedicated+hardware+profile

Some players use a program called FSAutostart to accomplish this. From what I've heard it is a good program to do this with.

Lastly get a good spyware cleaner. Ad-Aware or Spybot are good ones. You may want to run both to make sure you get everything. Spyware or Adware is notorious for being poorly written and loaded with instabilities.