just decided to play nhl2003 for whatever reason. installed it and everything but when i try to play it, it lags out terribly, the music slows, video, and everything. recommended specs are only 600MHz and 128ram. initially i thought maybe it was my cdrom for whatever reason. so i got a crack that eliminated the need for cd play. (legal cause i have purchased the game) i have a geforce 4, and sblive. i believe its the sound card. the game ran fine before about a year ago, which means a worse vid card (radeon 7000) and an old ass soundcard. Less ram. totally baffles me. every other game i have plays and runs prefectly. i dont know why i believe it to be the sound other than, since i can turn it off in this game, that the less i hear the sound the better it runs. suggestions?

thanks brian

I suggested this for someone else having a similar prob:

Try turning off all your background apps before playing the game & see if that helps.

Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del...when the Task Manager pops up, select the Processes tab...then click on the Column heading "User Name" (this will put "all your ducks in a row"). Now, "End Process" all apps associated with your user name except for EXPLORER.EXE & TASKMGR.EXE...don't mess with anything else.

Now try your game...

When you're finished, make sure to reboot to re-enable your antivirus & any other necessary apps

W/O knowing your system specs it's impossible to pinpoint the problem but usually it's something stupid like like you don't have enough free memory with all your applications running in background, as suggested above.

Make sure you have the latest drivers for all your equipment and run DXDIAG to make sure DirectX is working. SCANDISK and DEFRAG your hard drive and make sure you don't have a memory resident virus sucking up resources. You should have 512 or 1Gig memory installed to your system for smoothest gameplay. Check with the game's support website to see if there are patches for it - usually if it's happening to you, it's happening to lots of people and they'll try to release a fix.

before i tried anything, i decided to work on my hunch a little. so i created a new hardware profile and disabled my sblive and used my on board sound. tried running the game and sure enough, everything is running smoothly. but, i would really like not to have to reboot and select hardware profiles everytime i wanna play one game. i did run dxdiag and everything was working correctly. any ideas based on what i found out?

thanks

forgive me i am mistaken, while it may have run smoothly in the menus, gameplay was serverly choppy, it was like playing in slow motion. back to the drawing boards. will look into everything else you guys said. let you know what happens

thanks

Does your motherboard use the VIA chipset? I remember a problem like this a couple of years back playing Ultima Online - the geniuses at Origin rewrote the sound code to use chipset drivers and it turned out there was an incompatibility between Sound Blaster and VIA that no one knew about. If you had that particular combination you wound up with a memory leak and loss of frames that made the game choppy as heck. The work around was to disable the SB soundcard; VIA finally released a patch that took care of the problem. Check your SB and motherboard drivers to make sure they're up to date.