I'm having problems running online games, but I've also discovered it applies to offline gaming too. The problem games are Day of Defeat (the Half-Life mod) and Activision's Call of Duty. Originally these ran without a hitch. Now when I connect to a server (running DoD's net_graph function) it tells me my fps is 60 (the XP default apparently). However, when I get control after connecting my frames per second drops to between 4 and 9!!! My in and out streaming also drop dramatically (to about 1.2k/s and 0.4k/s respectively - they should be about 3 times as high I'm led to believe). What's wrong?

My machine...

HP Pavilion 522n (unmodified)
Intel Celeron 1.8GHz
256MB RAM
Intel 845 Chipset
onboard gfx and sound (new cards are not an option due to penny restrictions)

I've already reformatted my hard drive, replaced drivers with current versions, etc. I haven't played with my motherboard or BIOS yet, but I don't know how. Please help!

PS: Thanks to you guys for getting me through the whole RPC Blaster virus. You guys are great!!

What do you usually get, fps wise? With an onboard graphics card, I wouldn't expect much, but around 30-40fps? I've never played COD, but heard about it...okay, let's go through the routine things.

1.) Make sure all antivirus programs and DISABLED when you begin to play. They bog down the game.

2.) Make sure you don't have thousands of tasks running in the background. Only run those NECESSARY. Type msconfig at Start>Run and look at the list. If you see things that you've never heard of, google search them. I almost ALWAYS find an explanation for something I don't know to do with.

3.) If possible, disable firewalls. Make sure you have already granted access to all the programs if you are running something like ZoneAlarm.

My suggestion is, get a memory upgrade. I went from 128 to 512, and WHEW, it went so much longer without freezing/slowing down. You could buy some fairly quality sdram/ddr ram for maybe 30-40 bucks at the local best buy.

If you've done ALL of those, I would just (in all seriousness here) is get a new video card. You could buy one used if you live near a computer shop. I recently bought an evga.com mx440 64mb from a friend for 30 bucks. 30 bucks. It sells retail for 80.

i suggest terminating all of the programs that you have running in the background of your windows. i reccomend a program called "end it all" ( do a google search to find it) and it will pick through all if the programs that can b terminated, without doing any harm, and terminate them,. it makes games run smoother and enhances your pc's speed. i use it everyday!

best of luck,
MTatt0n

Thanks for the replies guys....

Matt, I guess I used to get around 30fps with my onboard card. Although this is low by some users' standards, for myself this was normal and I was very used to it. I used to play DoD3.1 on an old PII machine at about 20fps - my friends couldn't play it without complaining, but I didn't seem to notice it.... However, it's now a problem at 4fps!!!

Tried stopping tasks - no luck. Also thanks MTatt0n for the EndItAll2 suggestion. No luck. It didn't cause any problems, but didn't fix any tho. Nice tool ;)

It's not firewalls, although I do disable them, because it happens when the game isn't being played online. (Of course saying that to play one player DoD you have to create a LAN game). My network card appears to be working OK, because that's where my broadband connection is.

Hardware I haven't tried yet - planning on getting a GeForce 4 Ti4600 PCI card (which apparently means I have to switch back to DirectX 8.1) and perhaps some more memory. (Incidentally I upgraded DirectX to 9.0b in an attempt to solve this problem!)

I'm not convinced it's the cards though, because it used to work fine and now only frame rates in games and DVDs are affected. Mainly first person shooters - Sudden Strike 2 seems to work ok on 800x600. But anyway....

Thanks for the help (any more suggestions greatly appreciated) and apologies for this long post!

M