Ok ive been searching and searching through google and in here. I have an acer aspire laptop with an amd1100 mobile vid card. its a 128mb card. It playes games fine, i get good fps for the games i play, WoW and CS1.6 but EVERY 5 minutes i get this horrible lag that brings my fps down to 5 fps. this lasts for about 5 seconds then starts to run fine again for another 5 minutes till it does the lag again. When im watching videos or just browsing my computer it runs fine. i formatted my computer since i couldnt do anything to fix it, it still does the same thing. im out of ideas and i cannot find any resolutions so i finally posted. any idea on whats going on??? theres also no unexpected processes popping up. my computer is freshly formatted with only WoW, firefox and aim installed.

The specs aren't all that mind-blowing to begin with. You said you re-installed with only a couple of games. Because you are pretty comfortable with installing Windows, try optimizing the system correctly as well. http://www.tweakguides.com/files/TG...

Since you seem to have got this down to a rhythm - my suspicion is that the lag is associated with a program or process that is most likely running in the background. It is however hard to specifically say which application or process this is. Another thing is, have you tried playing this game via a different internet connection? You might want to try that since you have a notebook to see if the same lag occurs.

I agree with sabertooth, I used to have a simialr problem. Turns out it was a program running in the background checking the hard drives SMART status every 10 seconds. Have a look at what is running in the background. Mattwizz3 : Vista Home Basic 2.2GHz Sempron 1GB DDR400 GeForce 6800Ultra

"I have an acer aspire laptop with an amd1100 mobile vid card. its a 128mb card" More than likely, your notebook is based on the ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 chipset, which would mean you have integrated ATI Radeon X300 graphics with 128MB of 'shared' hypermemory. In other words, it's not very good for gaming, despite your claims otherwise. http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Ra... http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors... I agree with Sabertooth that you probably have something loading in the background. Do you have the retail version of XP or the Acer version? If it's the Acer version, it probably loads bloatware along with XP. Run MSCONFIG & see what's listed under the startup tab: http://netsquirrel.com/msconfig/msc... And make sure to install the latest chipset & video drivers: http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html FLATURIN - Hand-to-mouth goodness. It's good!

Well I had my game (WoW) in window mode so i can watch the processes. No new processes were popping up when the lag came. I noticed that my lag comes once my laptop starts to heat up. so after like 20 minutes, it starts the lag. for the first 20 minutes it runs fine. after that its consistant. I also tried new and old vid card drivers. the only processes that lag really bad at the time my lag comes is system.exe and system idle. i tried to ctrl alt delete system.exe but it dosent let me. anyways.... is it just that my laptop cant handle such high usage???? it ran fine before..... im bummed. help plz