FPS..Packet loss..???

[onan]

Any help appreciated in advance

I don't know what FPS or packet loss is but I know my frame rate runs at about 17-25.  Worse when I get near a busy area.  Sometimes The screen freezes and I end up back in the tower or in a kind of jittery screen state.  Any way of sorting this out?
I recently de-fragged the puter' and it made no difference, then I used a prog called "Gamebooster" and it wiped out all my settings for my soundcard. 
The offline mode only gets to 35ish frame rate.
Is this all down to my rig or can I tweak something to help?

KlunK

[Lusche]

FPS is frames per second. Packet loss is the loss of information send through the internet.
Generally spoken, lost packets can result in warping, but genuinely low framerates are caused by low resources on a computer: it just can't process data fast enough.
To decide if this is coming from having something messing up your performance due to bad settings, or due to having a system not up top the challenge we need more information.

A dxdiag output would provide valuable infoprmation (See http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,270056.0.html about how to get this)

[onan]

Thanks Lusche.  I will get an output of it.  See what's going on.