Pause / stutter

[MarcusMaximus]

I am running G-Force on a Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop with a 1.6gig processor, 512mb ram and a 128mb video card. Looks great and runs smoothly except for an occasional glitch where it momentarily freezes or pauses and then carries on. Earlier today, this was happening every 30 secs or so. I have read through the faq etc. and I know this can happen when manually switching flowfields but this is happening without my doing anything. I have switched off both my virus checker (but left the rest of McAfee Security Centre running) as well as internet access but to no avail. I think it might coincide with hard drive access, maybe even when G-Force accesses it, but not sure. I wonder if anyone could shed any light on what might be causing this and also how to fix it? Would increasing the ram to 1gig help?
Many thanks.

[markofkane]

Check your task manager processes, and see if something is spiking the CPU every 30 seconds or less.

Also, just because you quit your Anti-virus, security center, does not mean it always stops running in the background.

Hope this helps.

[MarcusMaximus]

Thanks for that. Makes sense. Any quick tips on how to spot which might be the troublesome processes and also, is there any way of preventing Viruscan etc. from running in the background? I know there is a way to trim down the default startup processes but I don't remember how.

[markofkane]

Try

Start----Run----Type in "msconfig" (without quotes)

Click on the startup tab. Disable all.

Reboot.

See if there is any improvement.


Now remember: If you disable your anti-virus program, you will be vulnerable to virus attacks. Best to not be connected to the internet while testing.

Hope this helps.

You are using Windows XP?? That's all I know.

[MarcusMaximus]

Yes I am using XP.

That's really helpful. I will certainly try what you suggest.

Thank you very much.