Unfortunate problems of a surprising nature

[tinkthank]

THank you.
I did have the GG open (for the tutorial), so that may have been something, and I am sure I was connected to the internet as well, and may have had a notepad open and Outlook Express as well, although I am sure I shut that. I did, however, make sure to start the game FIRST (as indicated in the "Tuning" section) and the other applications afterwards.
I notice no slowing in general with other applications when I have demanding things going on; I usually have iTunes open and listen to music when gaming (must ... hear ... music), or Pandora (streaming radio), but it is SPww2/mbt which bogs down, not the other apps.
thank you

[Mobhack]

well - having a DirectShow (used for the sound) game which is wanting to play real-time sound, in competition with other application(s) which are also wanting to play real-time sounds at the same time is likely your problem.

We already say this in the GG as paragraph 1 of the "Tuning your machine" section:

The game wants as much real memory as possible, so for optimum performance, especially on lower end machines, try to run the game with as few other windows programmes running in the background as possible. Also, since many other programmes will fragment the main Windows memory, it is often a good idea to reboot the box and start the game as the first thing run. Do not run it in paralell with any other games! - only windows desktop type applications.

"Windows Desktop Applications" are things that do not compete with DirectX/DirectPlay games in real-time for game hardware. So Word, Excel, Borlands C++ Builder and email apps etc, and not other games, or game-like applications (like music and video streaming) that compete in real-time with the game for the same critical game resources (video and sound cards and DirectX COM objects).

Try playing without the sound or video streaming apps, and see if everything works OK in the game when nothing is competing for the sound card?.

Cheers
Andy

[DRG]

tinkthank said:
THank you.
I did have the GG open (for the tutorial), so that may have been something, and I am sure I was connected to the internet as well, and may have had a notepad open and Outlook Express as well, although I am sure I shut that. I did, however, make sure to start the game FIRST (as indicated in the "Tuning" section) and the other applications afterwards.
I notice no slowing in general with other applications when I have demanding things going on; I usually have iTunes open and listen to music when gaming (must ... hear ... music), or Pandora (streaming radio), but it is SPww2/mbt which bogs down, not the other apps.
thank you

If you read the "Tuning Your Machine" section then you read this line at the start....

"The game wants as much real memory as possible, so for optimum performance, especially on lower end machines, try to run the game with as few other windows programmes running in the background as possible."

Although your machine may not exactly be "lower end" you have problems running the game that no one else has.

We do recommend people "run the game with as few other windows programmes running in the background as possible"

So turn off all the other things you are running and see what happens.

Andy asked if you had defragged your HD lately.......have you?

He also asked you to try turning all sound off(including the keyboard mouse click)to check if this may be a sound card issue..... did you?

I asked you to check DXDIAG........did you? It's possible you may need to make adjustments. What version of Direct X are you using?. I told you my machine will start to bog down when I'm running a lot of things as well as the game but that's MY machine and it runs with far less RAM than your's does AND the game, even at it's slowest, does not even remotely behave the way you describe yours does after 15 minutes.


Run the game and ONLY the game and NOTHING else and see what happens

Don