Well, I'm completely mystified. My computer has suddenly decided to start wigging out with every single game I play as of yesterday, and absolutely nothing I've done to try and fix it has worked.
So, here's the deal. My computer's a couple years old, has Windows Vista Home Premium as the system. GeForce 9500 GT graphics card and 4GB of RAM. Nothing fancy, but it's been a solid, reliable machine that I've been able to play most all games on just fine, from Minecraft to Borderlands 2 to Mass Effect 3. As of yesterday, I suddenly got hit by the same problem in every game I attempted to play: after a short while of playing I'd suddenly be hit by intense lag that more or less froze my screen or dropped it down to like 3 FPS, lasting for twenty seconds or so and repeating every couple of minutes. Things like Youtube and my art programs are fine, it's just with games.
I've done a lot of research online, including looking up similar topics here on Tom's Hardware, to no avail. I've done the following:
- cleared out about 50GB of space on my C:/ drive
- defragmented both my harddrives and cleaned them out in every way I can think of
- dusted out the tower case and made sure all fans are still operating
- uninstalled every unnecessary process and program I found in task manager and my program list
- scanned my computer with both Spybot Search & Destroy and AVG 2014, deleted the few bits of crap they brought up
- updated my nvidia drivers with a 'clean' install, tried out everything from Quality to Performance settings
- made sure Windows Update was indeed updated and no updates of any sort were running in the background
- tested my memory, CPU and temperature, everything appeared functional
- made sure no antivirus stuff was running, turned off indexing service
All that, and the lag freezes are
still happening. I have a Wacom Cintiq that doubles as a second monitor when I'm not drawing, so I used that to keep an eye on Task Manager/CPU and tower temperature when I did a test run of Minecraft. When the lag freeze hit and brought my game to a standstill, I didn't see a spike of any kind. CPU and temperature were normal as ever.
To make sure I'm not just a blind idiot missing the obvious, here's some screenshots of my task manager upon startup and my GPU/temperature info:
I've tried
everything. Wasted two whole days of precious thanksgiving vacation time trying to figure this nonsense out. Attempted nearly every fix I saw both there on Tom's and elsewhere. None of this has worked!
The only thing I can think of that might've happened is that my DirectX got screwed up somehow. This past weekend I was invited into the Elder Scrolls Online beta test, so I downloaded & installed that. It was late at night and I was tired when setting it up so I'm not 100% sure, but I have a foggy memory of that beta installation asking me to update DirectX. When I tried playing the beta the whole thing was intensely laggy and unplayable, which I assumed was due to it being a beta, so I just uninstalled it and moved on. Thing is, I played other games afterwards over that weekend with no problem, this lag manifested only just yesterday.
According to my computer I currently have DirectX 11 installed, the most recent version, which I can't remember if it's what I had before. From what I've seen DirectX is impossible to rollback to a previous install version, so if that
is the culprit I think I might be out of luck.
Any suggestions? Do you think it's DirectX, or something I somehow haven't tried yet, or something completely obvious that my stupid self missed? Nothing's worked and I'm pretty much locked out of all my games because of this!