frame skipping?

[jrowe6]

hey guys, im new here. looking for some help with my computer.

first off, this is an alienware laptop. aurora m9700. it has a 2.2ghz amd processor. 1gig ram, i think just ddr. and a 265mb nvidia go geforce 7900gs gpu.

here is the issue i am having, its a gaming issue....

i will be playing an online game, bf2142. at first everything will be fine but after a short period of time the game will start to freeze very briefly every 2 seconds or so. i somewhat suspect the wireless card is overheating because i will play the game just against the computer, not online, and it will work perfectly. i never have the blue screen of death. this computer has never done that.

i dont know if i should suspect the cpu, it never crashes. i have a hardware monitor program and i keep tabs on the cpu temp and the gpu temp. during heavy gaming the cpu will get up to about 75c and the gpu about 72c. the slowdown threshold for the cpu is 95 and the gpu 110. one thing has me worried tho, i took the computer apart one time for fun. didnt know the stuff between the gpu/cpu chips and their heat sink had to be reapplied each time. and that was before i monitored the temps. i have now put some good thermal paste on both of them.

i did some reading about cpu's going bad and it all seems to show its self by crashing, blue screens, that kinda stuff.

and gpu's they always talk about artifacting, which i never have. so i'm somewhat under the impression both the cpu and gpu survived my mistake.

i also installed a second game i had but never played online, advanced warfighter. got it set up and played it online, had a very similar issue as with bf2142. the skips were much farther apart, but every so often it would be like i was having a huge lag spike.

sorry this is getting so long, i just want to give you all the info i can.

anyways, let me try to describe these lag spikes a bit if i can. when they happen, all the players and everything going on in the game stops dead in its tracks, even me. if i am turning to aim at someone or moving i stop dead briefly, then everything goes back to normal.

i monitor my ping in game and it never changes during the lag spikes.

something i have noticed is as i play bf2142 it appears that my page file is always increasing. i check my windows task manager during gaming today, the game actually crashed, and the page file was over a gig! that seems a bit uncalled for does it? ive been playing this game on this computer for over 3 years now. the whole time ive bad the comp. what could have happened to make this start all the sudden?

some more info, ive reformatted the computer a few time and reinstalled the game a few times, every time i completely update windows then install the game and all its updates. every time the game continues to have this problem.

so yea.....what is wrong here?

 

[The_Other_One]

Only 1GB of RAM? That seems awfully low... That certainly won't help performance. If you're too low on RAM you'll be going into swap which is tremendously slower than RAM.

As for thermal paste, as long as something is there, you should be fine. If you don't reapply it, it may not function as well as it should, but I doubt it would damage anything. Most processors have very good thermal protection now-of-days so it would underclock should anything start going wrong.

So this problem is only when your playing online? Have you started an online game, noticed the problem then switch over to regular? I kind of doubt it's actually your wireless card simply because they typically work or don't work.

Have you tried playing using a wired connection?

 

[jrowe6]

yea ive done all i can think of to test the game. i play until it starts screwing up, then leave the server and go to a different one. it will play good every time i reload a server, but only for a few minutes. then after ive been playing i will go to play without being online and it will work just fine.

as for a direct wire to my internet......here is another indication its some kind of internet problem.

i tried to hook it up directly to my cable modem, wont recognise the connection............

 

[The_Other_One]

Try maybe going through a router rather than directly though your modem. Most modems now do act more like routers (DHCP and all) but there's a chance it might not. However, connecting it to your router, you should be assigned an IP address.

 

[jrowe6]

tried, and failed. i think i remember having this issue when i first got this thing. if i remember correctly i called alienware and they walked me through a bunch of bs and got it working.

anyways, heres another thing......i get crackling in my sound sometimes. fairly frequently these days. not like constantly, just some crackles and pops on occasion. never very long, just a brief crack or pop.

i tried playing advance warfighter, not online just the campain. definitly was a bit choppy. that game is a bit more demanding than bf2142 when not playing online so i figured id try that. so yea....seems like the overall performance has gone down.

you said if i dont have enough ram i could be going into swap? whats that? i know the computer can manage a page file on the hard drive where it tries to use the hd as ram, is that what you are talking about?

this comp came with the "alienware dock" which is a program you can run that shows the cpu load, ram usage, and hd usage. the amout of ram i am using with no programs running is the same as it has always been, around 30%. when i am online running bf2142 i am using up to 85% of my ram. but like i said ealier, when i checked windows task manager today after having been playing for a bit, even with it being all choppy, i played to the point where it was so bad i could hardly deal with it anymore, so i checked the task manager and it said the page file was just over a gig. is the page file different than ram? i dont really understand the numbers shown on the task manager.


totals: handles(14239), threads(555), processes(59).

commit charge, no idea what that is. anyways. total(506***), limit(2519540), peak(634412)

physical memory:total(1047792) available(508***) system cache(408***)

kernal memory: total (58***) paged (45***) nopaged(13076)

*'s mean those numbers were changing

whats the difference between physical and kernal memory?

also, my page file is at 495mb right now, with nothing open but task manger and internet explorer with two tabs open. one was a youtube video, closed that and its now 462.

not sure any of that is relevant but i dont really know what else to look at to monitor what the computer is doing with the memory.

again, sorry for the length of this post. i just dont know what information would be helpful so i figure i might as well give everything i can. lol. thanks for the help