Windowed Mode

[Giddylad]

Hi All!

Have been playing The Sims 2 for some time, very happily now.

Recently built my new system and i'm trying to play in 'Windowed Mode' (adding "-w" to the end of the main shortcut), rather than in fullscreen. However, in this mode the game is extremeley 'choppy' and performance is extremley depreciated, almost as if my hardware is not being used to accelerate the graphics.

System:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 (running at 3.15Ghz (7x450))
2Gb DDR2-800 (running at 900Mhz)
ATi Radeon X1950 Pro (256Mb)
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 5.1
32Gb free HD space on C:

All drivers for hardware and chipset are up-to-date, as is Windows.

I have exhausted my current knowledge of where the problem may lie. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Any suggestions/help is much appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

jamie

[Mirelly]

What OS?

I am currently running TS2 with all expansions in windowed mode on a similar, 32 bit Vista system, (only with AMD processor) with no difference in performance compared to the non-windowed state.

There are known issues related to dual core & HT cpus ... see this thread at MATY (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,7748.0.html) for more information and a possible fix.

Running a program in windowed mode might allow some Windows services more access to the cpu than otherwise, though I have no idea how.

[Giddylad]

Sorry, missed out the OS. I'm running Windows XP Pro (32 bit). As I said, all up to date. Thanks for the link - i'll look into that.

Anymore help is very welcome

jamie