I recently upgraded from XP Home to XP Pro on my Pentium 4. Now running any game (Diablo 2, UT2k3, etc), it will lag for anywhere from 5-15 seconds then be fine again for almost exactly a minute, then do it again and again, etc. I have a geforce 4 and have tried all kinds of different drivers but to no avail. I also reformated and did a fresh install of XP Pro. I have no troubles playing music or watching movies or anything else, which leads me to believe it's tied in with DirectX somehow. I've tried running Diablo with both DirectDraw and Direct3D and get the same result. Any insight would be great appreciated!

XP pro is not a gaming OS and is known for those types of problems. I would go back to XP home if I were you.

When you play online game and it lag, there is not much you can do about it. It has nothing to do with winxp. Try find a low ping server and try it. Xp home and Pro are identical except some features home dont have.

Although I don't have a solution, I'd like to say that contrary to Troy's experiance, i have been able to run a multitude of games on windows xp pro (including diablo 2) without any problems or slowdowns what-so-ever. Also, pro is mostly the same as home, just with a few added features. You may want to try dxdiag, and/or reinstalling directx, but if formatting didn't work i don't know how viable those ideas are.

I have WinXP pro and GeForce 4 and get no problems...especially with diablo II... Have you tried the latest Detonator drivers from nVidia? There are 2 available on the site for XP, get the one with the highest software version number. I think its 4. something.

do you have a cheap hard drive?

I did try the latest drivers but then diablo doesn't even run. The two openeings play (blizzard/blizzard north) and then it minimizes and wont get back up again. Two Maxtor 40gb hard drives...hand picked. Have had the computer for over a year and had no troubles with it til this past month. I'd be willing to go back to XP Home, except my computer didn't come w/ an XP installation CD, just a recovery cd to bring it back to factory...but it relied on the backup partition I killed a while ago.