Troubleshooting Bizarre slowdown

Discussion in 'The Sims 2' started by Marty, Mar 16, 2006.

  1. Marty

    Marty New Member

    Bizarre slowdown

    Hi all, I'm so excited to have found this forum. Here's my story:

    I got this computer, it's got a...

    ~Dell Dimension 8200
    P4 1.7Ghz
    256MB RDRAM (<-- why!?)
    Geforce 3 64MB (Vanilla)
    HDD supporting UDMA5

    I don't know what else there is to say about that. So, here's a odd part. When I got this computer, it had WinME installed on it. I installed The Sims 2, and performance was pretty good. I could have multiple sims onscreen, and the opening movie (my personal benchmark) ran smoothly from start to finish.

    I reformatted the drive and reinstalled WinME since it was full of leftovers from the previous owner. The Sims 2 opening movie was choppy after that, but i went ahead to support.dell.com and DL'd new drivers. When I installed the "Intel integrated ATA controller", my performance came back instantly. The opening movie was as smooth as silk and I knew I was back in business.

    Flash forward to about six days ago, I installed Windows XP. My machine bogs like crazy when I get up to a small handful of characters onscreen, and going downtown is almost a slideshow at times. The opening move is back to being janky for the first 10 seconds or so.

    I've done everything to get that performance back... I've adjusted my page file, upgraded all drivers, installed the spiritual successor to the "integrated ATA controller", the "Intel Application Accelerator". I even set my hard drive to "performance" instead of "quiet". Oh, I also defragged my HDD.

    So, is it because I'm running XP? I feel like that performance is there, waiting for me to perform an arcane ritual, but I feel like I'm missing one or two of the dance steps.

    Thanks so much for any assistance.


    -Marty
     
  2. ManagerJosh

    ManagerJosh Benevolent Dictator Staff Member

    Marty

    I would attribute the performance decrease to the installation of Windows XP. It's far more resource consuming Operating System, and I believe the bare minimum system requirements for running Windows XP SP2 falls along the lines of 128MB of RAM or 256MB of RAM. Most people I know nowadays have close to 1GB of memory on their notebook for optimal performance.

    Anyhow, that's my take.


    Other thoughts.... it should run somewhat well, did you install EVERY single Windows XP Update available? Note people who use pirated copies don't get every single patch :p
     
  3. Marty

    Marty New Member

    Yep!

    Every single one, sir!


    -Marty
     
  4. ManagerJosh

    ManagerJosh Benevolent Dictator Staff Member

    Well I honestly can't tell if you are running a legit copy of Windows or not nor would I suggest you publically announcing you pirated a copy, but if indeed you do have a legit version and have downloaded every single windows update, then most likely it's attributed to the lack of memory.
     

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