Windows XP Slowwwwness

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Vegita
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Windows XP Slowwwwness

Post by Vegita » Tue Mar 23, 2004 12:44 am

My Windows XP crawwwwls when opening and closing some games.

Like, after the choose to exit from the game, Windows very very slowly redraws on my screen. When this happens the hard drive is being heavily used. Also, it remains sluggish for quite a while after.

Some games are fine, ie. WC3. But some aren't. ie. Far Cry. It seems to be the more resource-intensive games that slow me down.

Do I need more RAM? I've got 512 atm.

idealcrash
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Post by idealcrash » Tue Mar 23, 2004 2:06 am

Looking at your sig I think it's pretty obvious. Your maxtor drives are in slow mode. Try turning them to performance/fast mode and you'll notice a difference. With my ide barracuda V, the time it takes for windows to load and draw all the icons on the desktop between low mode and performance mode is pretty dramatic. :shock: That drive it's as fast as my wd 1200jb se in performance mode, but it's also much louder than the wd. :lol: I don't think more ram will help you. I have 1gb of dual channel pc3200 ram @ cas2-2-2-7 and have the slowness too.

alglove
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Post by alglove » Tue Mar 23, 2004 12:39 pm

To me, it sounds like you could be needing more RAM, and you are hitting the swap file.

To see if you need more RAM, right-click on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen and choose Task Manager. Go to the Performance tab, and take a look at the "MEM Usage" graph. This tells you how much memory you are actually using. Also, the "Commit Charge Peak" value is the highest amount of memory you have used since you logged into Windows.

Keep the Task Manager open, or at least minimized, and go about your normal Windows activities. Also keep it open while you are playing Call of Duty, then take a look at the graphs while in the game or after exiting. This should give you a concrete idea of exactly how much RAM you need.

Vegita
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Post by Vegita » Tue Mar 23, 2004 2:40 pm

I played Far Cry, and after I exited, Commit Charge peak was 648MB. I have 512MB RAM.

edcrane
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Post by edcrane » Tue Mar 23, 2004 2:50 pm

You might need more ram, though this would probably manifest itself most when loading new levels in games (i used to show up to RTCW maps a good 45 seconds later than everyone else when I was running low on ram and the machine had to swap). The other possibility is that your hds are running excessively hot. This happened to me before when I had 3 drives housed closely w/out active cooling. Check HD temp readings w/speedfan or similar monitoring software and verify that the drives are < 50c when the lag occurs.

Lazarus
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Post by Lazarus » Wed Mar 24, 2004 12:09 am

I'd also be suspicious of any programs/services running in the background.....especially anti-virus software. I had Nortons do this to me to the point where I uninstalled it, and went with AVG instead.

axhind
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Post by axhind » Wed Mar 24, 2004 12:46 am

another thing you could try is to clean up your harddrive. use a regcleaner, run adaware/spybot and defrag (diskeeper,..).

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Post by trodas » Wed Mar 24, 2004 4:24 pm

Agreed with axhind, but dude mainly - 512MB ram is a joke todays! :? Far Cry game is pretty resource hugry application. Frankly, from their poor performance and very big levels, you might take a hint - like never use that on slower that 3Ghz cpu and anything bellow Radeon9700 or NV 5800 :wink:
And - of course - 1Gby... better 1.5Gby of memory. Then problems are gone. Also minimize number of running programs, when you starting a game - preferably to zero :wink:

Most modern games need more ram. Doom3 alfa2 allocate 1Gby of ram, so it swaping like hell, when you have only 1Gby of ram - remember, you need some ram for windows, drivers, screenbuffers and so on :wink:

Vegita
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Post by Vegita » Wed Mar 24, 2004 9:36 pm

Yeah, swap file usage went wayyy up when I was playing - I checked in Task Manager.

So if I have 1GB of RAM, will this problem cease to exist? Can anyone with Far Cry verify this? It's a simple test, open Task Manager for a few minutes, and then open Far Cry (while keeping Task Manager open).

On mine, the PF File usage spiked way up when I ran the game.

MGP
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Post by MGP » Thu Mar 25, 2004 12:45 am

I wouldn't be quick to blame the issue on 512MB of RAM as my school PC lab (which is used for game development) consists of Dell Dimension XPS' equipped with only 512MB DDR 400 and they all run Far Cry easily with lots of eye candy (of course, their 3GHz CPUs and 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro's help too :D ).

axhind
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Post by axhind » Thu Mar 25, 2004 2:14 am

I don't agree with some of you if you say that 512MB of RAM is a joke. I've got 512megs myself and I can play the latest games without any problem, WITH eyecandy. Imo the only valid reason to have more RAM is when you're a heavy photoshop/3dsMAX/... user, or when you want to play a game while burning a DVD, ripping a movie and have another 10 progs opened...

idealcrash
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Post by idealcrash » Thu Mar 25, 2004 3:24 am

Vegita, before you go out running to buy more ram, I still advise you to turn your hard drives to performance mode just as a test and play the game. You probably won't stand their noise for too long but at least you'll know if it has something to do with it. :wink:

nutball
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Post by nutball » Thu Mar 25, 2004 6:56 am

axhind wrote:I don't agree with some of you if you say that 512MB of RAM is a joke. I've got 512megs myself and I can play the latest games without any problem, WITH eyecandy. Imo the only valid reason to have more RAM is when you're a heavy photoshop/3dsMAX/... user, or when you want to play a game while burning a DVD, ripping a movie and have another 10 progs opened...
He said his swap file usage went "wayyy up" when playing the game. This means the system is running out of memory. Period.

Precisely why it is doing this is a different issue, it could be that the game genuinely requires that much memory, it could be extra stuff running in the background. But swapping == low memory.

Vegita
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Post by Vegita » Thu Mar 25, 2004 8:01 am

idealcrash wrote:Vegita, before you go out running to buy more ram, I still advise you to turn your hard drives to performance mode just as a test and play the game. You probably won't stand their noise for too long but at least you'll know if it has something to do with it. :wink:
I'll try it for one game with a stopwatch and one game without... but man is it loud!

bomba
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Post by bomba » Thu Mar 25, 2004 8:35 am

for further Xp performance tips:

Techbargains.com Windows XP Performance tips: http://techbargains.com/hottips/hottip12/index.cfm

Blackviper.com: http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/winxp.htm

Beyonder
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Post by Beyonder » Fri Mar 26, 2004 1:19 pm

I'm pretty sure 512 megs of RAM is enough for the vast majority of users, but some people have cluttered os's running heaps of garbage in the background and sixty meg wallpapers (which gets loaded into memory, incidentally). If you have a lot of background processes running, your machine may be eating up 200 megs of RAM just sitting there.

I made different hardware profiles on my laptop--one of which is a "gaming" profile--and when I reboot, the commit charge when I boot into XP pro is about 75 megs of RAM. I've seen cluttered OS's boot into windows with 200.


I'd also make sure your hard drive is defragmented, and consider getting rid of programs running in the background that you don't use. You might also go through services running in windows that you're not going to use (consider making a "gaming" hardware profile) and disable them. Be careful doing this--make sure you know what the service does before disabling it...

Lastly, if your hard drives are very full ( <90%) then they become much slower. I don't know how full your drives are, but as you get towards the center of the platter, sequential read and write speeds drop quite a bit.

Vegita
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Post by Vegita » Fri Mar 26, 2004 6:28 pm

My drive is 96% full.. and not defragmented...

BTW, the slowness after exitting seems to be unique only to the games that use a lot of pagefile. ie. Far Cry, Silent Storm. Games like WC3 and UT2004 run fine, and don't use as much pagefile.

I'm guessing this lend more support to the theory I need more RAM?

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Post by Rusty075 » Fri Mar 26, 2004 6:53 pm

Vegita wrote:My drive is 96% full.. and not defragmented...
:shock:

There, ladies and gentlemen, is your answer.

Not only are you probably running a big swap file, but your swap file itself is probably fragged into a hundred pieces.

You need to do a serious housecleaning, or buy a bigger HDD. With a drive that full you'll never even defrag it properly. Keep deleting stuff (or burn it to CD and then delete) until you're down to 75% full or less, then defrag a couple of times, and I'd be willing to bet that your slowdowns are greatly reduced.

WayneSim
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Post by WayneSim » Fri Mar 26, 2004 9:03 pm

I agree with Rusty075.

I had this problem! I tried to play BF1942 about a year and half ago. It lagged so bad it was unplayable (768mb of ram). I found out that I had about 2 gigs left of a 60gig hard drive. I deleted about 10 gigs. Then the game work 100% with no lag!

"My drive is 96% full" would be 99.9% of your problem with out a doubt!

Hard Drives are not made to run at 100% full. Let alone 96%!

Delete stuff dude!!!

nutball
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Post by nutball » Sat Mar 27, 2004 1:06 am

Vegita wrote:My drive is 96% full.. and not defragmented...
I'm guessing this lend more support to the theory I need more RAM?
You need more memory and a new hard-drive.

Jan Kivar
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Post by Jan Kivar » Sat Mar 27, 2004 1:19 pm

WayneSim wrote:Hard Drives are not made to run at 100% full. Let alone 96%!
Actually, the Murphy's Law for hard drives is: No matter how much HD space one has, it will eventually be 90% full... 8) :D

Cheers,

Jan

Vegita
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Post by Vegita » Sun Mar 28, 2004 3:05 am

So now that I'm thinking of picking up another stick of RAM, would I get any benefit from getting a namebrand one over a generic, given the stick I have in there already is generic?

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Post by Ralf Hutter » Sun Mar 28, 2004 6:55 am

Vegita wrote:So now that I'm thinking of picking up another stick of RAM, would I get any benefit from getting a namebrand one over a generic, given the stick I have in there already is generic?
I highly recommend getting quality, name brand meory insteaed of generic, no-name memory. Memory is too important to try and save a few bucks. Go with Crucial. Kingston, Corsair or the like. They all sell quality memory and have good warranty support, if you ever need it.

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Post by Beyonder » Tue Mar 30, 2004 12:09 pm

Correction: Hard drives are made to run at whatever fullness you desire.
Sure, they'll run at whatever capacity you have them running at, but as you fill up the drive, the read and write speeds shrink because of the circular nature of the platters on the hard drive. Towards the inside of the platter, the rate at which the drive passes the head is slower and thus the drive just isn't as fast. Likewise, towards the outside of a drive, it's faster.

If you're not using a hard drive for virtual memory (for example, I have a storage drive on a network computer that's full, but it's no big deal because the computer has another drive for OS stuff, programs, etc.) then none of this is really a big issue besides the slowdown in sequential reads and writes.

Vegita
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Post by Vegita » Wed Mar 31, 2004 4:39 pm

Beyonder wrote: Sure, they'll run at whatever capacity you have them running at, but as you fill up the drive, the read and write speeds shrink because of the circular nature of the platters on the hard drive. Towards the inside of the platter, the rate at which the drive passes the head is slower and thus the drive just isn't as fast. Likewise, towards the outside of a drive, it's faster.

If you're not using a hard drive for virtual memory (for example, I have a storage drive on a network computer that's full, but it's no big deal because the computer has another drive for OS stuff, programs, etc.) then none of this is really a big issue besides the slowdown in sequential reads and writes.
Well that may have been true if I wrote continually to the drive with the drive intially empty. But once I erase some stuff, the free space is no longer only on the inner side of the disc. Although defragging would help remedy that...

hofffam
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Post by hofffam » Sat Apr 03, 2004 6:54 am

I hope you realize the impact of that fragmented, nearly full drive. First of all existing files on the drive scattered all over the place in little pieces. I don't know what the executables for the your games look like, but probably the files are large. When you start the game Windows has to load the files and instead of finding them in a nice neat sequential bundle it has to search for them everywhere. The hard disk heads are seeking constantly until the files are found and put together in the correct sequence. The other thing is that the game probably generates temporary files it needs during the game. Because the disk is full and fragmented, the free space is scattered everywhere. So it takes a long time to create the temporary files. At exit the temporary files are deleted and it is also slower. Your swap file is probably fragmented and if it is also performing badly. You may need more memory but if your swap file performed well you memory might be just fine. Delete some files and defrag it before you do anything else.

Vegita
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Post by Vegita » Mon Apr 05, 2004 1:58 am

A problem I have with defragmenting is that the programs require 15% free space to do this. I only have 4% free space, and I can't really afford to keep 15% free so I can regularly defrag.

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Post by Ralf Hutter » Mon Apr 05, 2004 5:27 am

Vegita wrote:A problem I have with defragmenting is that the programs require 15% free space to do this. I only have 4% free space, and I can't really afford to keep 15% free so I can regularly defrag.
Yes, that's certainly a problem, and until you can either free up some space, or get a larger drive, you'll have to live with your slow performance.

You might want to take a look at some of the aftermarket drfrag programs. IIRC, some one of them claims that it doesn't need the typical "20% free space" to effectively defrag. Look at Perfect Disk, Diskeeper, O&O Defrag, Norton's Speed Disk or maybe Vopt. I think it was one of them that claims to be able to defrag a very full HDD.

hofffam
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Post by hofffam » Tue Apr 06, 2004 5:58 pm

Vegita, I have a hard time believing you can't free up enough space on your drive to get back enough space to run a defrag. The standard things like emptying your recycle bin, deleting temporary internet files, etc. can do quite a bit. One other thing - if the file system by chance is FAT instead of FAT32 or NTFS your cluster size may be large enought (e.g. 32K) to waste space with small files. If you have to - uninstall some software to get some free space. Zip some very large directories temporarily. You probably don't have enough free space to install a clean up program.

For the price of more memory you can add hard disk capacity - which you will need soon anyway! You simply can't run at 96% full for long. By the way - adding memory will reduce paging, but does not improve the speed of access to fragmented files nor will it help with creating new files.

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