uhm... Let me see if i can get the lingo right:

"Fuck! You're welcome!"

punch your balls off!!

That only applies to non-optical mice.

ok guys, i got a new windows machine. my old one was rarely on for more than a few hours, every so often, so i never had time to notice this phenomena before, but the new one gets slow and sluggish and nonresponsive after being one for a day or so. i'm talking like, i rebooted it and it was doing fine. then i opened one filesharing program and played some games, it was fine. closed the games, left the ONE program on, and a day or so later it is all slow. nothing else is running.

WTF is wrong with windows? is there a good site detailing how to clean up the start menu? what other current tweak tools do you guys recommend to keep non critical processes from starting and wasting cycling time?

quote:

Originally posted by electric dragon:

WTF is wrong with windows? is there a good site detailing how to clean up the start menu? what other current tweak tools do you guys recommend to keep non critical processes from starting and wasting cycling time?

I've had that happen. I think I fixed it by changing cache storage to next to nothing, disabling automatic downloads (or something like that) and by shutting off a shitload of automatic startups.

For the startups, I use a free program called "Startup Mechanic".

Have a look through the Powertools from microsoft. It's a pack with some cool tools that they developed, but don't actually include or promote at all. It does a couple of nifty things though. There might be something in there that helps you along. Tweak UI is extremely usefull and i'd say essential if you want to wrestle XP in obedience.

The start menu... First of all you'll want to go for "classic mode". Right click the start button and choose properties. Then you can enable classic mode which already shrinks the start menu nicely (i hate the other - default - view, it's so f'ing bloated it can take up almost half a screen).
You can clean up the Programs menu by right clicking the Programs item and choosing explore. You wont see the items of the menu in there (or maybe just a few) but you can make new folders there that'll show up in the menu; and then you can go back to the Programs menu and drag the other folders or shortcut arround to organise it the way you want to.

As for the slowness, it's poor memory management i'm afraid. Also you might want to check if there aren't any programs that run in the background (they might be preinstalled or something). Some of them are pretty useless but take up memory anyway. You'll find them in the system tray (that series of icons next to the clock). Or you could press ctrl-alt-del and see what processes are running (though killing processes can be a bit risky as it's hard to tell which is doing what).
Specially filesharing stuff can for some (to me unknown) reason wreak havoc on your memory. Avoid keeping it open for no reason.

If there's anything else you need to know, just ask it (and don't spare the details). After years of running XP i got pretty good at manipulating it.

yeah, i actually was good at manipulating XP too years ago when i had it running on an old pentium 3 machine. this new machine tho is the tablet XP version, so i don't know which processes are essential at startup for the tablet features and which ones are just crap preloaded by Toshiba. (damn machine booted up running 85 processes out of the box!)

85? ... wow, that's brutal.

This one is for the XP gods...

I installed the demo for Defcon last night, and I start playing it for around 15 minutes, when my machine just drops to reboot - no BSoD or any other error message, just restarts from boot.

So I went ahead and installed any and all updates I could find for my Bios, graphics card, OS, sound card, etc...

Tried again and same results. I checked my processes and there is nothing out of the ordinary that Process Explorer sees. I cleaned out the registry so there is nothing there. Did a full virus scan on the system and nothing came up. Also did a defrag and error check on the drive and also came up negative.

I'm stumped. I also tried Company of Heroes and it would do the same thing. Playing Rome: Total War doesn't do this, however.

No expert (far from it), but I've had similar hiccups occur with game demo CDs before... most notably with an Alien vs Predator demo disc which always required a power-button reboot to get out of.

Yeah, this was a direct download from their site, however...

Had something similar happen with the one game demo I ever took off a site, as well; haven't bothered to demo a game via Interweb since.

I always figured it was a built-in frustratofeature designed to goad people into *buying* the stoopit game. But... you'd know about those, wouldn't you?

is there a forum for the game? maybe someone else has the same problem or it is addressed already....

Tried a search for DefCon and it keeps bringing up the hackers meeting...

Bollocks.

The thing is, since it's affecting two very new games, I am wondering why they both are crashing my machine in the same way. More importantly, why are they not crashing all my games in the same way.

try searching "'developer name' defcon"

Could be a graphics driver/graphics card issue.

I've had major DirectX/NVidia/MSI synergy issues. Even tried Vista beta and the drivers for that hang the same way. One thing that has helped a lot was switching to some the Omega drivers. Computer still hangs under heavy DirectX load, but much less frequently--like once every 2 hours of play vs once every 20 minutes.

My symptoms were a little different--video freezes and audio goes into a loop. Still, might be worth a shot.

On Wanderer's suggestion, I tried installing/playing games on another profile. Luckily, I had one setup for my girlfriend. I tried running Rome and it worked fine. Will try to install Defcon tonight and see if it works. If so, I will create a new profile for myself, kill the old one, and clean install everything over again.

Since I already had dumped all my installations on my portable drive, this shouldn't be a problem. Just a pain in the ass.

I, too, have an MSI mboard but use an ATI 9600 gfx card and a SB Audigy Z2 running XP Pro.

I hope it works...

Oh and speaking of Defcon... i finally found a way to make it play nice with my router.

Do tell...I use a BT router and forwarding has always been a problem.

I found some resources that might make a reinstall excessive. System Restore points have come up often in forums, with mixed results, but some have mentioned faulty memory (don't think thats it) or overheating (which, again, shouldn't be a problem but I use Speedfan, so I can check the temperatures and voltages).

I don't think it's anything mechanical or hardware related since the games work in the other profile.

The problems, I think, are definitely related to Company of Heroes and I think they have some nasty root-kit or other that embeds in your registry. For anyone thinking of buying it, do your research first to see if this is the case.

I used http://www.portforward.com/ to check my router type and the procedure to open up the ports. At first it didn't seem to work, but when trying the next day i could actually connect to other game servers.
With defcon specificly, you must remember to put on the "port forwarding" setting in the options menu. I think this forces the game to always use the same ports or something.