Horrible Hard-Drive Lag / Choppiness

[BotaBing]

When I play this game, assuming that I have no applications (that I know about) running in the background, and that I've just had a fresh reboot, it only takes a few hours before the same thing happens every time.

After a few hours, I start to get massive hard-drive lag and choppiness. The choppiness goes hand-in-hand with constant repetitive accessing of the hard-drive. It makes gameplay impossible, the only way I've found to fix it is to reboot.


I have a Dell PentiumII 350, with 128mb ram, a 16mb TnT 3d card, a turtle beach sound card, and a 19 inch monitor. I don't have any significant problems with the computer other than when I play this game.

Sometimes I notice the problem when there are multiple cons in the area, other times noone is around as far as I can tell.

The only hardware issue I can think of is that I have played a lot of games over the past 3 years, installed and uninstalled over and over, and I've logged a LOT of hours on these games.

Any ideas?

[snafu]

Hi Botabing,
What version of Windows are you running? Doesn't W98 have a "Fast find" utility. (Correct me if I'm wrong). I've heard this can cause all sorts of disk access problems/stutters/slowdowns when gaming. If this is you disable it.

Hope this helps

TTFN
snafu

[DrSoya]

The FastFind utility is installed by Microsoft Office, and it's a good idea indeed to remove it to avoid exactly this problem. Look in your Windows Startup menu. C:\Windows\Start\Startup or something like that, can't say the exact path, mine isn't in English.  

Of course you could just right-click on the item in the Start menu itself, and delete it.


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DrSoya
308 (Polish) Squadron "City of Cracow" RAF [AH]
315 (Polish) Squadron "City of Deblin" RAF [WB]
Part of the Northolt Wing (First Polish Fighter Wing)

[Mark Luper]

That is what is happening Botabing, it is findfast

Right click on start then explore.
Click on programs then startup

Delete the icon for fast find.

Problem solved  

MarkAT

[bloom25]

If you don't end up having fastfind on your system here are a few more things to try.  First of all, defragment your HD.  (If you have never done it before it will likely take several hours.)  It's a good idea to defrag every couple months.  You might also try running a scandisk to see if your hard drive has errors and/or bad sectors.  The last thing to try is to make sure you have at least 300 Megs or so of free space left on your HD.



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bloom25
THUNDERBIRDS