I'm having the same issue 2 other people have talked about. I've got C2D with Nvidia 7900 GS and 2 gigz ram, gigabyte 965ps3 mobo. Definately enough firepower to run battlefield 1942. I'm running it in XP compatibility mode as an administator.

During gameplay about every minute or 2, (usually right before I get into combat), the FPS will drop or totally stop, and I will hear some sort of fan or drive or something wind up in the computer, either a hard drive, or cpu fan, or graphics fan, or something. it sounds like a drive winding up, then the game will come back to normal, and I will usually either have crashed a plane or gotten killed in combat. This seems to be a common problem with Vista. I have no antivirus installed yet, only whatever came with vista. Homebuilt system. I was thinking it was Punkbuster, upgraded that no help, disabled it, no help. I've tried running a system monitor on my 2nd screen to see what process or application fires up, but I haven't figured that out yet. It never happened when I had XP home loaded on it...I think it's a Vista thing. I've tried disabling all processes except explorer and the ones it won't let me disable, no help...

Help me Tom's Hardware Guide forum members,
you're my only help

Princess Turd

If you hear something in your case it aint the vista. Altough vista does suck when it comes to games. sounds your harddrive. try switch one

Hi, have you disabled things like cool and quiet both in vista and in your bios. It is known to cause issues. Also try checking you power settings in the vista power options in the control panel. Put it to high performance. Finally run a coretemp check to make sure your cpu isnt running too hot. A quick speedfan check will also determine if your gpu/hdds etc arent running too hot ( Which could be causing the components to power down a little etc.
Reinstall all board and graphics drivers. You might have to google and see if a beta driver will help you out.
What power supply do you have? Is it sufficiently handling the load?
Finally run 'msconfig' in your run command bar and see what processes are loading up with your windows startup. If there are any that you cant recognise/validate remove them from start up. The same applies if you browse your task manager processes.
Vague suggestions but I hope they help.

You hear the hard drive running when this happens???

Then you are running out of Memory. What is happening is your system is slowing down because it has to go into the hard drive to swap data in and out on the new images/enemies.

Some of the newer games, especially strategy ones like BF1942, can use a LOT of RAM. Combined with the extra memory usage you have with Vista, you can/do hit the wall with 2GB.

Just to give a heads up, with your guys help the problem seems to have resolved. I went into vista and set the power management profile to performance. Now I went back into my BIOS of my gigabyte motherboard and turned on the performance features. I had it set for basic performance, but I went in and set my voltages to auto which allowed me to increase my performance through the bios. I got back into battlefield1942 and had absolutely no issues. Hopefully that is all it was. Thanks again for the help guys
Turd

OMGPLZ, it's the harddrive spinning down due to INACTIVITY, just change the timeout to forever, or some other long period of time.