Can't figure this one out, please help

[Helevitia]

I posted this over in rage3d's forum as well but thought I'd ask you guys here too.

Greetings,

This may be long...In a galaxy far, far aw....nevermind.

Problem: Whenever I play Counter Strike, Q3A, or Mech Warrior 4, after a random amount of time(10-30 minutes) my game starts to get choppy for no apparent reason. And what I mean is, the game starts to hesitate and the sound crackles everytime it hesitates. This happens atleast twice a second and progressively gets worse until the game is completely unplayable. The weird thing is, if I DON'T host(multiplayer) the MW4 game the problem does not happen there. It always happens with CS though.

Things I have tried:

-different drivers(currently 7072)
-different 4in1's(currently 4.28)
-different mobo BIOS(currently 1005c)
-disabling all kinds of stuff in WinME including anything running in the background except 'explorer' and 'systray'. Not too mention that I've disabled System Restore, etc...
-I've reinstalled both games
-I've done the voodoo raindance from hell until my feet hurt

Suspects:

-WinME(Win98SE was definitely more stable and I don't want to reinstall just yet)
-Radeon drivers(no way of proving it)

Specs:

Thunderbird 700@850
Asus A7V
256MB pc133 Mushkin rev. 2
WinME
SBLive!
Radeon AIW 32MB DDR
Maxtor 20GB ATA/100
IBM 15GB ATA/100(currently used for Win2k dual boot)
HP CD-RW 10x4x32
Samsung DVD(currently not hooked up)
Zip 250
3COM nic - Etherlink XL

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

Dave

[Gurm]

My vote is on WinME. Seems to be the theme in here today.

Upgrade to Win2k, that will solve most of your problems outright.

- Gurm

------------------
Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Maggi]

Hi Dave,

I don't have ME, but could it be related to your vcache settings, i.e. is it maybe swapping dut to unoptimized cache settings ?

Same thing about your swap file itself, is it fixed or variable ?

Cheers,
Maggi

[Rags]

I think The Maggi has the right idea. It sounds like something is taking up the last bit of your virtual memory, and windows is rehashing it while you are in game. Try his suggestion first.

Rags

[paulcs]

These are the vcache settings I use. I'm curious about the settings others opt for.

For 384 MB system RAM

[vcache]
MinFileCache=98304
MaxFileCache=98304
ChunkSize=512


For 128 MB system RAM

[vcache]
MinFileCache=32768
MaxFileCache=32768
ChunkSize=512


For 256 MB system RAM

[vcache]
MinFileCache=65536
MaxFileCache=65536
ChunkSize=512

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[MultimediaMan]

I use the 25% RAM Rule too, Paul, and it seems the best all around.

I use Cacheman to set it up...faster and safer than registry surfing, especially if you sneeze while typing a key...

I'm betatesting Cacheman 4 now, lots of new goodies and a much easier to use help file as a guide to setting Vcache, Filecache, Chnk size and Directory allocations.

[paulcs]

Thanks.

I have a series of text files with configuration information and notes. It comes in handy if (I should say when ) I reinstall Windows.

I just cut and past the vcache setting into my system.ini file.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[MultimediaMan]

I hear you. I setup all of my boxes with most of my commonly (re)used files on another Drive or partition (Apps, Device Drivers, Temporary Internet Files, Favorites, Email Addy book/messages, ICQ, etc...)

A complete format and reinstall of the OS and core applications takes only 5 reboots including updates.

With all the WinME bashing going on, let me point out tht WinME can be "fixed" prety well by setting Vcache, making sure you have the IDE Cache update installed, and killing system restore completely and utterly.

One cool thing about WinME: If you happen to use the Linksys LNE series cards (Hopefully you weren't duped into the NotWork Anywhere Network cards Wally World is selling for $20.00 - get the Linksys LNE100TX with WOL...a far superior card, with a lifetime warranty) WinME doesn't recognize the Version 4.x cards, right after you install the drivers though, you can start running the network card immediately, without rebooting. It's a nice way to save a reboot or two.

When I get my Fileserver's RAID 0+1 array up, I'll start Ghosting my boxes (right after a clean setup) to a folder on the array and be able to format and Ghost back any box in about 15 minutes...but that is a project for later (I need four identical 20+GB 7200RPM ATA100 Drives first...)

[Helevitia]

Thanks for all of the replies everyone. Here is what I've done...

I added the info under vcache in my system.ini file as per Paul's recommendation, I set my swap file to 2x my memory(256x2), defragged all 4 of my HDD's, used cacheman to optimize my memory(cool program). I tested it out for a short while yesterday and didn't see any problems but feel I didn't test it long enough. I'll do that today. The only question I had is when I set my vmemory settings, do I set the min and max to the same number? That is what I did anyway. Or do I set the min to 0 and the max to 512?

Thanks again everyone,

Dave

[Rags]

Set the numbers to the same. This will make it the setting static.

Rags

[Mechaman]

On a similar note..
A similar version of this problem occurred on my machine as well(P2/233, P2B-S, 128M RAM, G400MAX, latest Matrox drivers, Win95C). The most annoying thing was, it started after I installed the Blade of Darkness demo. Removing it seemed to fix the problem, but it started occuring again last week. After a few days of tinkering with settings(uninstalling a lot of old software, cleaning up registry, screaming, etc.), it no longer seems to do it during games(but haven't extensively tested it). However, when playing a long video file(19min) using DVDMax, it will invariably start stuttering/freezing exactly around 10-11 minutes. No disk activity is taking place either--it's like some process is stealing all of the CPU. I've already used Cacheman 3.80 to set it for multimedia levels, but the problem reoccurs each and every time. Any further suggestions?

[Helevitia]

My computer started dying on me after my last post. It would only boot sometimes which lead me to believe that I had a hardware problem accept that I could boot to Win2k with no probs. At this point, I decided was best to reformat and put Win98se back on. Am I so glad I did that. My computer hasn't run this good in a long time. After all of the problems I've been reading with the A7V and WinME and my own terrible experiences I thought it would be good to put 98 back on. Thank god I did that. Anyway, just wanted to post the outcome in this thread just in case someone else runs into similar issues. And again, thanks for all of the help.

Dave