Periodic lag spikes in games

[Cown]

Hi

I've recently started gaming again and am experiencing some very annoying lag problems...

Out of the blue the games start to lag for a few seconds and then run smoothe again and then they lag and so it continues and it's starting to **** me off... (The games do this even if I choose the lowest possible gfx detail, so I'm thinking windows might be the problem?)

My rig is:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 2.8ghz cpu
ASUS CROSSHAIR mobo
2x 1gb Corsair XMS Dominator PC-8500 RAM
XFX Geforce 7950GT gfx
WD 150gb RaptorX hdd

OS:
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

Drivers:
Newest releases from nvidia.com

The system is not OC in any way

Games I'm having problems with:
Bioshock
Kane & Lynch
Crysis

and now even Hitman: Blood Money is doing it, which ran smoothe on my old rig...

Any help or new insight is gladly welcomed, thanks in advance

[ziggo0]

I don't mean to sound like a XP fan boy but if your going to game, stick with XP for a while longer. It will offer the best performance and reliability vs Vista...DX10 isn't all that and a bag of chips just yet, the visual difference is minor where as the performance hit for DX10 games is major. Maybe if you still want to stay with Vista make a partition for XP? Just for gaming?

[Hardin]

I think your thinking of stuttering. Lag is a multiplayer issue. Is a virus scan running in the background?

[NsOmNiA91130]

I don't mean to sound like a XP fan boy but if your going to game, stick with XP for a while longer. It will offer the best performance and reliability vs Vista...DX10 isn't all that and a bag of chips just yet, the visual difference is minor where as the performance hit for DX10 games is major. Maybe if you still want to stay with Vista make a partition for XP? Just for gaming?
It's not Vista. It used to happen on one of my older computers any time I was in a game, regardless of OS.

I'd check the Event Viewer in Administrative Tools to see if Vista is reporting anything odd. If not, try reinstalling recent drivers.

[Cown]

I've tried killing my AV program as well as updating to newest drivers and as for the partition part I bought the raptor disc mainly because I had this problem, so I reinstalled everything running all games from this disc thinking it might improve performance, but no go there :(

The event viewer doesnt seem to report anything out of the ordenary..

[Red_LightRanger]

I would also run a virus/spyware scan and maybe defrag a couple of times.

[chevro1et]

Does the AMD dual core optimizer patch apply to AM2 processors? I know that it cleared up a similar issue on my old opty 165 s939 rig...

[Mr.Guvernment]

do some trace routes to the servers your playing on if multiplayer, could be an inet issue/ bad connection

[Trottel]

This happens to me as well from time to time. I wish I could know what the cause was. When my install is fresh, this doesn't happen. After months it happens more and more. Still not very much though. I have done all spyware virus stuff too. Maybe with a dual core I won't have this problem?

[Leviathan41]

So what exactly is happening? Does the game freeze for a split second every once in a while? Is your hard drive activity light on when the stuttering occurs?

I had an issue with Crysis stuttering a lot in Vista. It turns out that the Vista disk defragmenter is set to run automatically weekly and it runs in the background without letting you know. That is something you could check. You could also go through and stop all processes that are not necessary and see if that helps.

[Cown]

The games just suddenly stutter for a few seconds and then it goes back to normal.. I've disabled he scheduled defragmentation now, hope it help :) thanks