Here is a another good one, I'm learning a lot setting up this laptop to game correctly. My desktop ran with no problems right out of the box, the Dell 4100 Inspiron L/T is quite a different story.
I noticed while playing that every few minutes my gameplay on the laptop would really degrade, couldnt figure out why. I started playing with the variance delay screen up so that I could watch what was happening. Sure enough I would get the "sawtooth" like clockwork every ten or so minutes, it would last a while, go away, and come back again.
I think I've got it figured out though, Windows XP has a couple of functions that take regular "snapshots" of the system to do roll backs and such and stores them. These are the System Restore Service and the Indexing Service.
I think the best way to deal with this is to set up a custom Service Configuration for gaming. Anybody else done this?
Oh yeah, this was happening AFTER I shut down all the other stuff Skuzzy mentioned in his tips and tricks.
