Game has suddenly started getting starty and stopy....

[MWL]

Greetings,

I am running Windows XP on a 5 year old Alien machine.

I have pulled up the task manager and noticed many progams listed.  If a program is not eating up CPU percentages but is consuming memory, is this impacting on the game?

If so, what programs do I need to leave on?

Regards,

[RSLQK186]

From another thread I responded to:

My CPU usage with AH running is 100%. Dual cores may be different-mine is an AMD 3200+. I run XP sp2 on an HP. No grafics/vidio tools or controler support(X45 does fine without it).

I have 16 processes when I view task maneger while game is up on-line:

PackethSvs.exe-needed to run my dielup(not sure why)
taskmgr.exe-needed to view list and will be off when in game
explorer.exe
wwm.exe-my $10 connection
Svchost.exe-4 of these and are critical- I killed them 1 at a time once
aceshigh.exe-vary neccisary and at 99% CPU usage
lsass.exe
Services.exe
Winlogon.exe
csrss.exe
smss.exe
System
Ststem Idle Proccess

Only 2 programs. My connection and AH2.

FsAutostart would be used if I did other things with this PC, but I don't. So it stays in this config at all times. Before I got a multi-media PC I used FsAutostart to stop and restart everything but what I need to run the game. HPs are loaded with crap for every possible printer/scanner/camera/moniter/and on and on.

FsAutostart also defrags your RAM.

[The Fugitive]

Its hard to go by someone elses list of programs, just about ever computer is different. Alot of programs load "some" of their program, to get it to launch faster..... all those icons down by the clock. These could use some of your ram.

If it is something that has suddenly started, look to anything you may have install recently. Also how often do you clean up your computer? Get rid of programs you no longer use, delete  old folders and files you don't use, run a complete virus scan with a fully updated scanner, run adaware to find any other crud that might be hiding in your box. Then defrag your computer. The windows one is OK  but I use "Aus Logics Disk Defrag". Its free version seems to work real well.

Once you've got the "spring cleaning" done, you might want to use FSautostart. This is a free program that you can use to shut down processes before you run the game so you can get it down like RSLQK186 has. They great thing about FSA is that it doesn't make any permenate changes. If you shut the wrong thing off and your computer crashes, just reboot and everything is back to the way it was, and you get to try again. To ease your mind, if your not sure if you should turn something off or not, you can google it to get more info, or you might find it listed HERE .

I clean my computer almost monthly, some guys I know format their drives yearly to keep them from getting cluttered up. Good luck !

[hammer]

MWL,

You left off the "when lots of other players are nearby" that you had in your first post in the help forum. One of the big offenders now is other players' skins. There are more skins than you have memory to pre-load them so they have to load whenever you encounter a new one. If you have downloaded all the skins and are allowing them to show up, this could cause the problem. A quick check can be done by going to OPTIONS>GRAPHIC DETAIL and put click on the DISABLE OTHER PLAYERS SKINS. If this solves the stuttering problem, you have identified the cause.

If this is the cause, you have 3 options for correcting it. The first is leave the DISABLE OTHER PLAYERS SKINS checked. This means you will always see only the default skin on other planes. Not a big deal since you rarely get close enough to see other skins. On your plane, you will continue to see whatever skin you have selected.

The second way is to have only certain skins available. Use this option if it's important to see specific skins like your squad skins when you up or do formation flying. To do this, you need to delete all the skins you don't want to see, leaving only the ones you do want to see. I believe you will also need to either empty your CACHE folder and let it rebuild or delete the the specific skins folders out of your cache folder. If you choose the second option, it is important that you know which folders to keep and which to delete. These will correspond with the file name of the skins you deleted or kept in the skins folder. Once this is done, you uncheck the DISABLE OTHER PLAYERS SKINS. Players flying the skins you have will show up in them. All others will appear as the default.

The third option is the most complicated. In this option, you substitute the skins you want to see for the default skins in the STDSHAPES folder in the CACHE folder of your main game folder. To do this, you replace the corresponding .TCA files in the STDSHAPES folder with the .TCA files from the skins you want to use. This makes them show up as the default. Then disable all the other skins and you should be ok. Be aware, though, that most of the player built skins are significantly larger files than the default ones so you could still end up with stutters if they are too large to pre-load into memory.

Regards,

Hammer

[bj229r]

Is hard-drive hammering when this happens? Mine invariably is

[MWL]

Greetings,

  Thanks all for the comments.  Adware and Defragmenting have done the trick.  (psst don't tell anybody I haven't done that in a while - took 4 hours)

Regards,