Aces High Bulletin Board
Help and Support Forums => Technical Support => Topic started by: SirLoin on December 14, 2002, 11:48:13 AM
-
I have been having this problem this last week.I fly for 20 minutes or so,then my PC starts making noises like it's installing a program and my frame rate tanks...Everytime...I'll be in the middle of a fight and then PC starts churning and my FPS's chugging.
Is someone accessing my hard-drive?I have scan-disced,defragged,done Reg Clean.No spyware detected
Is it a system problem and I'm paranoid,or am I being probed?
Appreciate any help..Thnx.
-
Good question SirLoin. Do you have dial up or cable? Dial up would be a bit harder to hack, but if you have cable and no firewall then you may seriously consider gettting one, cause your chances are WAY higher.
-
I have cable..Don't even know if I have a firewall..How do I get one?
-
That might be it....ok, there are alot of different Firewalls to go after. I used to have Cable and I used Zonelabs (http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/home.jsp). Very good. But unless you know someone that can get it for you....not in the right way :cool: ....then it can get expensive.
If you go to downloads (http://www.downloads.com) and put in Firewall as the search, you might be able to find some good ones. I hope that this helps some :D
-
zone labs do i free firewall i used it for ages its good try it out you can get from the web site
-
Bingo, there you go Sirloin. Hope this kills the problems. Keep me informed sir!!
-
That was happening on mine. I have XP pro. When AH would start slowing down, and the HD light was on, I would Alt-Tab out to the desktop, CTRL-ALT-DEL and bring up the task manager. Go to processes, and see which one is sucking up CPU percentages. Click on 'CPU' and it will sort the column. I think this works in NT2k also...
I found something that installed itself that I did not know about. Probably got there when I installed another program off the net. I just uninstalled it, so it was very easy.
Also if your running XP or W2k, check out Skuzzy's article on services..
Good luck.....
-
Well,I installed a firewall.BUt with it activated,I cannot log into any arena.It connects to arena selection screen,I can see the # of players but "connection lost" when I enter.I quit the firewall and no problem entering...But again,in the middle of a fite,my PC starts to whir,frames drop to 8p/s,and I logg off in frustration.
Something is eating my CPU and don't know what.
-
Just noticed Skuzzy's tips post..Going to try it out.
-
Skuzzy,I am running windows Me and there is no Administration Tools icon for diagnostic...Is there another way to do it?
-
Turn off system restore too SirLoin,also,are you running stuff in the background (antivirus,norton systemworks? ),if so turn them off before you play.
Login problem is ZA stopping you,alt tab out when trying to connect and "allow" aces to connect.
Let us know how you are going.
Steely
-
Could be your video card.
-
well,if it aint hackers sirloin,,it could be your vidcard or your windows me updater<~~i got windows ME too,,and i have zonealarm firewall,,and all the time your windows is tring to reach out and update every time you sign online,,,so if you can shut down the windows updater in msconfig it mite help,,because i can tell when mine is tring to update because my games started to run like crap everytime it was tring to update or scan,,i had to turn everything off,,stupid windows updater ends up messing your computer up anyways then the problems it fixes,,lol
but allso i would check out the hard drive and vidcard,,sounds like vidcard if it drops to 8 fps,,what kinda card you runing? and how much memory?
-
GF3 Ti500//520 ram.
-
go in ZA and bring up the list of programs and give permission for AH to access the net it should work fine always has done for me.
-
umm,,anuff memory thats for sure,,umm,did you check if auto update is turning its self on? or nortons?
geforce 3 should be good anuff,,ever have problems with it before?,,you have anothere card you can try in its place just too see if there is anything wrong
it mite just be a simple hard drive crashing,,doesnt matter what scan disk says or defrag,,they lie to you somtimes,,,if you know what kinda hard drive you have,,i guess you can go to there web site,,and download a scaner that will work for your drive,,because windows stock scan disk doesnt not pick up every flaw in a hard drive<~~my cousins computer just had a bad hard drive,,but scan disk came out perfict everytime and defrag,,and every time we pulled the trigger we got grafics lag,,and frame rate would go down to nothing,,,well after allmost rebooting his hole computer all his drivers,,checking vid card in my computer,,after all the trouble,,it turned out too be just a stupid hard drive,,it works great now,,lol
-
and does the frame rate drop online and offine?
-
Make sure that you don't have FastFind installed or listed on your Windows startup routine.
If you have QuickTime installed, make sure that you have LoadQM disabled in your startup routine and disabled in QuickTime options.
If you have WinME/2K/XP make sure that you have the auto-updater disabled.
Ack-Ack
-
Turn off ICQ as well, or at least put yourself in N/A or Occupied mode while playing. I find that if an ICQ message window pops up while I'm playing, the game will start to stutter in the same frequency as the little message window is flashing. Odd, but turning off ICQ stops it.
-
Disabled Autoupdate,closed all progs and still same...Is there any maintenance program that will tell my what function is driving my CPU crazy?
-
Might be a virus scanner or indexing service hogging up your hd.
If you're worried about hackers, close AH and go into command prompt. There type netstat /a and you'll see every active connection to your computer. If you have no games running and no internet pages open, there should NOT be any 'established' connection between your computer and an address outside your own subnet.
-
On a sidenote and not really related to this problem, I used Sygates firewall for a time, also a free version, and it seemed to respond to AH version changes better than ZoneAlarm did. I'm on dialup so I stopped using a firewall all together for more resources.
Here's a link to them:
http://soho.sygate.com/products/shield_ov.htm
Good luck with your problem,
fuzeman
-
the brand new zonealarm seems to work great with aces high now,,,just make sure you set it up to trust aces high,,i even hosted a little bit today,,with out any troubles
im afraid to tell you sir loin,,that your 3d card mite be bad,,,or maybe your hard drive is going to poo,,just because scan disk tells you its ok,,doesnt mean your hard drive aint going to hell<~~just got done fixin a computer that we allmost replaced everything to find out it was just bad hard drive the hole time,,,scan disk and defrag said it was fine,,but it really wasnt,,,now all his problems are gone<~~no more bad frame rates or anything<~~his computer was making nosies too like it was allways doing somthing more,,it was just the hard drive slowing everything down and going to hell
-
Originally posted by fuze
On a sidenote and not really related to this problem, I used Sygates firewall for a time, also a free version, and it seemed to respond to AH version changes better than ZoneAlarm did. I'm on dialup so I stopped using a firewall all together for more resources.
Here's a link to them:
http://soho.sygate.com/products/shield_ov.htm
Good luck with your problem,
fuzeman
I use Nortons InterNet Security Firewall, it's a bit more user friendly than Zone Alarm Pro, and it updates with all the other Norton Utilities and Anti-virus, plus it can block ads, and also blocking unsuitable sites when the kids are using my PC when I turn that facility on. These are added to nearly every week. It doesn't interfere with AH which is "allowed".
However, it is yearly subscribed, so it costs a little but not much.
On my client computers (networked to my main one) I have ZA Pro, it works just fine, though it's not really necessary. :)
It's amazing how many attacks it stops, especially rogue websites that incorporate trojans. Mainly sub seven trojans, but there have been many others. and the blocks quite often occur when playing AH when some ports are open for the game. If you don't use a router then a software firewall is a must IMO.
-
Just a thought, but is it your email app polling for mail?
-
Check your free space on hard drive, Clear all unused space. Also you might want to uninstall video driver and reinstall latest driver. I believe Ti is a Detinator driver, There is a Detinator killer to uninstall all the detinator driver componets if you are using a Detinator driver now.
VegasX
-
Originally posted by mrsid2
Might be a virus scanner or indexing service hogging up your hd.
If you're worried about hackers, close AH and go into command prompt. There type netstat /a and you'll see every active connection to your computer. If you have no games running and no internet pages open, there should NOT be any 'established' connection between your computer and an address outside your own subnet.
How do I enter "Command Promp?"
-
Originally posted by SirLoin
How do I enter "Command Promp?"
Not sure if this guess is worth a whole two cents but here goes.
Could he mean the ms-dos prompt?
[ I use Win98se so I still have one. ]
fuzeman
-
For win98: Start menu --> run --> type command
For Winnt, W2k, Winxp: Start menu --> run --> type cmd