graphics problems in winspmbt

[Pepper]

Sounds like a problem I get, if I don't shut down all unnecessary services on my machine. Smoke looks especially bad.

This was Mobhack's response to my post on it, although I think he thought I was just having slow-downs in performance:

FROM: MOBHACK
We already state in the manual to turn off unecessary programs and background tasks.

It may be useful though to figure out which common background tasks cause problems, if any.

A standard one that causes the game to go slow and jittery for me at least is Norton's sheduled weekly anti-virus scan. (the clue whn playing full screen is the hard disk starts chittering away like crazy !. This anti-virus scan does NOT seem to realise that the end user is currently playing a full screen DirectX game (I have had it go off when playing e.g. the Sims2).

the other suspects I have is thewindows disk catalogue function (A worthless item one can turn off). This trolls your hard drive to make searching for items allegedly faster (though I have not noticed any speed decrease since I turned it off).

To turn off this catalogue function. Open explorer, find the drive and right click, under properties (General) is a check box for "Allow indexing service to ... for fast disk searching" - uncheck that, and you have better general performance, with only a slight (IMHO) slwdown in searching.

Xp tends to do these things in "idle" mode - and it seems to consider a full-screen DirectX game "idle mode" (it is blind to the process?), whereas 98 did not.

Cheers
Andy




The problem is also discussed in this thread: http://www.strategyzoneonline.com/fo...ad.php?t=38339

Good luck.

[interstaterunner]

You know this may very well be the case. Now that I think about it the problem did seem to start the same day I installed spy sweeper. I will try turning this off when I play since I am not online when I play. Thanks pepper.