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Sudden intense lag problem in all my games

Tags:
  • Windows Vista
  • Lag
  • Games
  • Computers
Last response: in Windows Vista
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November 29, 2013 8:26:30 PM

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!

More about : sudden intense lag problem games

November 29, 2013 8:35:08 PM

This may sound stupid, but actually happened to me on my laptopt. I know this one is a desktop, but maybe for some reason "energy options" (or whatever it's called) has set the "System cooling policy" (or whatever it's called on vista) to "passive" instead of "active"?
That would fit most of your symptoms, as happened to me, and took me a long time before I realised.

May be stupid, but worth checking?
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November 29, 2013 8:47:30 PM

Also see if your power option is on high performance, and see if you need to reinstall your OS, that happened to me once.
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November 29, 2013 9:11:12 PM

My desktop's setting under Power Options is currently set to 'Balanced', same as it's always been as far as I know.

I'd have to go digging through my stuff, don't know if I have the disc handy for reinstalling my OS. I've actually never had to do that before, it wipes everything I have on my computer, correct?
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November 29, 2013 11:03:32 PM

I should also note that while I have my various files backed up I don't have a full windows-based system backup from before this started happening, and I have no idea where my Vista OS install disc is at. Ugh.

I'm fairly convinced that DirectX is the big culprit here, but I have no idea of how to go about testing that. Is it truly impossible to rollback?
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November 29, 2013 11:37:42 PM

Or, hmm. Tried another program that checks out my computer's vitals, results here. Everything seems to be in working order, but I'm guessing the ol' graphics card is running hot, isn't it.

Edit: it jumped up to 110-115C when I tested a game out, but everything then remained stable and did not spike when the lag freezes occured.
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November 30, 2013 7:58:05 AM

That would be normal when playing games, but not for a card like yours, try installing Speedfan and change your fan speed and see if it gets any better.
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November 30, 2013 9:50:15 AM

I actually did try installing Speedfan last night, but either my fans can't be changed or the program is too 'hardcore' for me to understand/work right.
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November 30, 2013 10:08:42 AM

Turn your Anti-virus off while gaming as a troubleshooting step. I'd wager things improve.
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November 30, 2013 1:44:59 PM

I don't have any anti-virus running, and the games are all marked as exceptions to my windows firewall stuff.
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November 30, 2013 11:46:21 PM

Hey all, turns out it was definitely a graphics card issue, and now appears to be resolved. Thanks again for your suggestions!
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December 11, 2013 5:11:55 AM

hubblebubble said:
Hey all, turns out it was definitely a graphics card issue, and now appears to be resolved. Thanks again for your suggestions!


dude how did u fix it because i am getting the same problem please tell me email me downie_04@hotmail.com please i desperate atm
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