Problem with games stuttering every few minutes

[MattyB87]

Hey guys, I recently started having an issue with my PC and cant quite figure out whats going on. First of all, I am running an AMD64 4000+ with a geforce 8800gt and 2 gigs of ram. I know this isnt exactly up to date, but I'm not trying to run crysis and the games I am playing have worked perfectly fine over the years. So to the problem. Whenever I load up a game it runs fine as always, but every few minutes (like 2-3), my game will start to stutter for a solid 3-7 seconds. While this is going on mouse control is very difficult as all of my controls are affected by it. Whenever I restart my computer, I can typically play a session stutter free, but if I come back later in the day the problem will persist. I don't think my system is overheating (though I could be wrong), as I have never had an overheating issue in the 5 or so years I have owned this PC, and all of my fans are still functioning as they should.

Any help you guys can give is greatly appreciated as this is driving me freaking crazy.

Thanks!

 

[Tamz_msc]

Exactly what kind of games are you trying to play?Have you got updated drivers?Also what OS are you running?

 

[MattyB87]

Honestly it is any game. Thus far the problem is happening in sins of a solar empire, darkstar one, world in conflict, etc. It seems to be happening in any game I play. My drivers are updated and I am running windows xp. Im thinking about formatting, but I don't know if that will help this problem or not.

 

[swifty_morgan]

You said in gaming and didn't mention just surfing the net or anything else. Could be failing hardware. Could be heat. Pop the side off the case and clean all your heat sinks of dust build up. The video card too.... even if it means pulling it out to blow through the exhaust end.

Do a HD clean up and defragg. If the drive is near full you could have problems. You also might want to check virtual ram. Increase it if need be. Scan for spy-ware and viruses.

 

[Guest]

I had a problem like this in games last year. Tracked it down to my online backup software Carbonite in the end. As soon as I disabled that, the stuttering in games went away. It wasnt even backing up or CPU spiking but it was definately that.

Its probably not Carbonite in your case but it could be some other bit of software which you wouldnt in a million years would think effect it but might be.

Try unistalling programs one by one and see how you get on.

 

[MattyB87]

Thanks for the replies, I have tried a lot of the things suggested already to no avail. I managed to clean out most of the dust, and have done most of the standard solutions (ie defragging, etc) to no avail. Im thinking my last hope is formating, I wont be doing that until I can pick up a nice big external drive though.

 

[MattyB87]

Oh and by the way, as far as browsing the web and other functions, I cannot detect and slowdown or stuttering, but I suppose the effect could be amplified when I am running something as resource intensive as a game.