Hi, just to be sure i thought id better ask this question on this forum, seeing as you guys are so good here. anyways, the problem is, whenever i exit soldier of fortune 2 or return to castle wolfenstein, my windows desktop takes a terribly long time to re-appear, the icons appear first on a black background, then my taskbar appears (with the clock and taskbar icons missing) then the whole screen refreshes, and my background, icons, and taskbar all re-appear fine. anyhow, after this happens, for a short period of time (about 5 mnutes) windows is also terribly slow (click the start button and the menu takes 2 seconds to appear). also i have found this problem occurs when i have just completed a virus scan with norton anti-virus 2003 except without the screen refreshing and the icons appearing business. just windows is slow after the virus scan completes, but only for a few minutes. i was wondering if it was a memory problem sort of a bottleneck, because my memory is not DDR and is only running at 133, and the delay is windows freeing up memory. i also play other games such as toca race car, and flight sim 2002 and this problem does not occur after playing these games. i will post my full system spec along with this message. if it is the memory then i will go an buy a stick of 512Mb DDR from crucial.com. thatnx guys, ur great! my system: Athlon XP2000+ with stock cooler 256Mb SDRAM PC133 (unbranded) K7S5A motherboard GeForce 3 Ti 200 (overclocked, but this is not the prob, does same thing when clocked at stock speeds and when underclocked) 550watt QTEC dual fan gold 20gb WD protege 5400rpm samsung 48x16x48 cd-rw lite-on 16x48 DVD

I had the same problems sometimes and believe me, it also happened with 512MB Ram. Not so often maybe but it still it happened. I also have SD Ram so I can't say for sure but I think DDR Ram will not help against this problem. As far as I know it's the problem you mentioned, that Windows needs too much time to free the ram and if the ram is blocked it makes no difference if you use EDO, SD or DDR Ram! What really helped in my case was a ram booster like Ram boost. It runs in the background and you can set how often it should work and how much of your ram should be freed. With 256 MB I think 50% is suggested. I let it work every 10 seconds and it really helped on both of my computers !!! BTW: If you have the money 512 MB of DDR Ram will still help with your system speed. Especially when you get a stick of cl2 Ram so you can ste the cas in the bios to lower waiting cycles between read/write and so on!

Its highly recommened you upgrade your harddrive, it has a slow spin rate, thus the loading is slow. buy a 7200RPM harddrive immediatly or be dragged by your ears into a miltary interigation bunker.

ok cheers for the reply guys. in the very near future i was planning on upgrading my ram and my hard disk anyway, including my monitor. Free Weasel, i have before tried WinRam Turbo but did not set it to free memory every 10 seconds or so because i was afraid that it would sacrifice system resources??? the hard disk i was planning on upgrading to is a Barracuda ATA IV 80GB 7200rpm, Good choice???

make sure it has a 8MB cache then buy it

I couldn't find any bad effects of doing it every 10 secs until now. You may loose a couple of milliseconds when it checks the ram but I had it run on my old pentium II 350@392 MHz and even MechWarrior Mercenaries ran smooth with it running (not at full setting but enough to do some network gaming with a friend!)! About the 8 MB cache for the new harddrive it's up to you if you want to invest the price difference. I'm not sure if it really makes that difference on a 133 MHz FSB system. I decided on a 120 GB Maxtor 7200rpm with 2 MB cache because the other cost much more. For me it's fast enough !!!