Titus Tyrwitt wrote:
Hello All,
After missing out on an entire generation of gaming due to having an ancient Dell, I saved my pennies and bought an Asus G750JW-DB71 two weeks ago. For the first week, I absolutely loved it. I loaded out Fallout 3 and Team Fortress 2 (a couple of older games I wanted to experience), and both ran smooth as silk.
Last week, though, I started experiencing some hitches in the framerate. Both games would hiccup at odd moments, which was strange given than they're both older titles. I've run two different types of antivirus software (the computer's clean), defragged the harddrive (Windows 8 said it wasn't fragmented, but I did it anyway), and updated my graphics card's driver (did nothing).
I'm not sure what to do. I loved that first week of awesome performance and would like it back. Does any kind-hearted, tech-saavy individual have some hints for me?
Generally, deteriorating performance that causes hiccups in playback - while streaming data from an HD or the internet comes down to just a few things.
1) Driver/app/OS changes - check your "uninstall control panel - sort by install date"
Uninstall / Back up to previously known good versions of apps/drivers/etc until your fluid game play returns, and then reinstall 1 at a time everything except the last thing you uninstalled - to see if more than 1 thing is causing problems - it might be 2 things that were installed recently and both cause problems. In the future avoid alots of updates - check game play between installs/updates and do 1 at a time.
2) Disk fragmentation - after installing a bunch of stuff, and updating older things, your disk becomes fragmented. Sometimes with a new game update, your blob is fragmented enough to cause hitches in scene and level loads - which happen in the background during game play on good games - which can show up as hiccups in the game.
The solution is to defrag the HD with a deep defrag program like PerfectDisk:
http://www.raxco.com/home/products/perfectdisk-proThe best solution is to swap in an SSD. The faster and larger the better. 512GB's have dropped in price, and now there are 1TB drives that aren't too expensive. You can still defragment these the old fashioned way - but it is recommended you invoke trim - and that can be done via Windows defrag alone.
3) HD pauses due to drive settings - Use QuietHDD, manually at every boot ( or use a cmd script) to turn off /disable APM/AAM (set both to 254) and Suspend so that the disk won't go into low power mode and pause the data streaming. You also need to set the Windows Power settings you are using to not sleep the disk (set to 0 = never).
http://sites.google.com/site/quiethdd/3) Additional software running in the background - indexing the disk, cleaning the disk, doing back gound downloads, etc.
Disable Windows Indexing Service, and to make double sure an update doesn't restart it, before you disable it use the Index settings to unset all the index locations, delete the index file and remake it with no Index locations set.
Turn background downloading off - or direct the disk location to a USB drive or the drive in the 2nd bay.
If you have something like Norton Internet Security - enable silent mode - and disable anti-virus so you won't lag due to av checks.
There are lots of other potential background tools that can interfere, you will have to sleuth your configuration to find and nullify them.
Oh yeah, turn off Windows VM paging file, set it to 0. 8GB+ memory is enough to run without paging. Stops lots of unnecessary disk traffic and frees up lots of space on C drive. Also disable Hibernation to save space, sleep works good enough.
Let us know how you fix the problem. Have fun.
🙂
