DescentBB

NF7S v2
Ti4400 (5303 drivers)
1 gig corsair XMS
XP2600+
Onboard Nvidia Soundstorm
XP Professional Corporate

Lately the game like freezes momentarily every 30 or 40 seconds. it like stutters.

the other day I Windows keyed out of d3 to check to see who had dropped in to teamspeak. I'm thinking that might have done something.

What I've done so far:

Uninstalled the vidcard drivers via the add/remove programs control panel.

uninstalled the card in the device manager.

Reinstalled the vidcard drivers

Fresh D3 install.

It's still doing it, any ideas?

Defrag your hard drive.

Those symptoms are the same as people usually get when their system tries to page something out to disk (or back) and the HD has to skip all over the place to get the page -- a slight delay, a little stutter, and then everything's back to normal for 30 seconds, when the next paging operation happens.

Watch your HD light next time you play -- see if it flashes every time the game stutters. Or, just defrag (and make sure you have some free space on drive C) and see if it fixes the problem.

You should not have any page swaps if you have a gig of RAM unless you're rendering in the background or something...

running Windows XP, you can get page swaps any time. "Gee, you have 800 megs of unused RAM. Lemme page that out. OK, now lemme page it back in, and page out the new 800 megs of unused RAM."

Other possibilities include FindFast (ugh!), virus scanners, or any of a number of other background processes.

I'll try the defrag. You guys don't think it's got anything to do with windows keying out of the game?

Bear in mind that if it's your page file that's fragmented then the standard Windows Disk Defragmenter isn't going to do much good as the page file is locked and can't be touched by disk utilities while the system is running. The official Microsoft way to defrag a page file is to move the page file to another partition and defrag the partition it was on before recreating the page file on that partition. A far easier way is to get a hold of a program like the full version of Diskeeper (the standard windows defrag is a derivative of diskeeper) and use it's ability to defrag the page file before the OS locks it.

I can't even minimize D3, everytime I do alt+tab or alt+enter D3 crashes and I have to reboot because it messes up my desktop colors.

punisher wrote:I'll try the defrag. You guys don't think it's got anything to do with windows keying out of the game?

Oh! I didn't read that!! Yah, you broke it...perminantly. Windows remembers that shiznit for-ev-er.

Shouldn't matter.

no luck finding Diskeeper. Is there a freeware util that will allow me to defrag the pagefile? Or can somebody hook a brutha up?

someone suggested that this problem might have something to do with openGL. Does anyone know if the OpenGL library can get corrupted, and if so, how do I put a new one in without reinstalling the OS?

Pun, try going back to the 45.23 drivers, I feel these are the best drivers for the Ti cards. After the 45.23 drivers Nvida started tuning the drivers for the FX cards and it shows. I tried the 53.03 drivers with my Ti4200 and I think they suck a$$.

Admiral LSD wrote:Bear in mind that if it's your page file that's fragmented then the standard Windows Disk Defragmenter isn't going to do much good as the page file is locked and can't be touched by disk utilities while the system is running

uhhh Norton's Disk Doctor can defrag PageFile, it even has a color code for Page File areas. the regular windows defrag however cannot.

here we go again FootCombat©

yeah if u wana install pos nortons on ur sys

I dont think it's the drivers, Kompy. This machine has been running beautiful with the 5303's for a long time now.

Is this a symptom that would reflect my HDD on it's way out? Or possibly the vidcard on it's way out?

AceCombat wrote:uhhh Norton's Disk Doctor can defrag PageFile, it even has a color code for Page File areas. the regular windows defrag however cannot.

Ace, try reading Admiral LSD's entire post...

Pun, the same stuttering happened to me a long time ago, and it was my sound card (SB Live) that was the cause. (At least for me it was) I reinstalled the drivers for the card and all was well. I just don't remember if I had reinstalled the drivers without uninstalling D3 first or not. Wish I could be of more help, but I can tell you that it's not your HDD that's the problem. Also check to see if fastwrites are on in BIOS.

K bro, I'll try runnung D3 with -nosound command line. That shoud tell me.

Punisher, I had a similar problem involving D3 stuttering every 5-10 seconds. It turns out that the cause was having 2 different joysticks installed at once, with 1 of them not connected. Getting rid of one of the installations solved the problem. I doubt that you have the same problem, but I thought I'd give it a shot.

is this only in multiplayer??

If so just for Siz Grins and Giggles... disable stats

I gave up and FDisk'ed. Works fine now. Thanks guys.