Acer Aspire 8930 'Laggy'

Hello All,

Just taken delivery of an Acer Aspire 8930 spec below:

Processor - Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 / 2.4 GHz ( Dual-Core )
RAM - 4 GB (installed) / 4 GB (max) - DDR2 SDRAM ( 2 x 2 GB )
Hard Drive - 320 GB - Serial ATA-150 - 7200 rpm
Operating System - Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
Screen - 18.4" TFT 1920 x 1080 ( WUXGA ) - 24-bit (16.7 million colours) - CineCrystal
Optical Drive - DVD±RW (±R DL) / DVD-RAM / BD-ROM - integrated
Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce 9700M GT - 512 MB

Has anyone had experience of this model being laggy? It seems really slow in windows and in games. It regulary freezes and playing games such as FM 2009, Call of Duty WAW and GTA 4 are almost unplayable. I have got the latest graphics and audio drivers but it is still laggy in windows compared to my previous Acer laptop which had an inferior spec.

I dont have a virus as i have panda 09 installed and is uptodate. The virtual memory is set at system managed, and i have also allocated another system managed virtual memory on one of my other partitions.

Any suggestions would be appreciated?

Many thanks in advance

Cheers

 

Have you removed all of the Acer programs (and other things you don't use) that came pre-installed?
If not, my first suggestion would be to first do that, then clean out the garbage from the system using CCleaner, etc ...

Next ... on which resolutions are you running your games at?
If you are running them maxed out on native resolution, chances are you have to reduce the resolution in games as you gpu is not a high end one.
It's a cream of the crop of Nvidia mid-range gpu's, but not powerful enough to play those games in native resolution.

GTA 4 will most definitely be laggy despite what you do because it's a very cpu intensive game (it has issues running on quad core cpu's ... and yours is a core2duo).

So my second recommendation would be to reduce the resolution you are playing the games in.

If windows performance doesn't increase after deleting all the excess garbage, then you might want to consider wiping the C drive and installing Vista 32bit on your own (without the Acer bloatware) if you have the installation disk.
You can use any Vista Home Premium (with SP1 slip-streamed) installation DVD, then use the OEM key located on a sticker (lower part of your notebook) to activate it.

Making a clean install of an OS is often the best way to go ... but at the same time, removing garbage pre-installed programs will also solve a lot of the issues.

 

i can compare mine to my dell and sony, and it seems fine tbh as its faster then either.
and my spec is lower then yours and i have stock drivers.

 

i was going to do that, but you wouldnt get any of the acer drivers and stuff.
eg: cinedash, launch manager, acer arcade(blu ray media player) and other stuff.

and acer dont have much software on their site. when i bought my laptop, i deleted some stuff and once i found i wanted it back, i couldnt get it as its not on the acer site.
the only way to get it back is to do a "acer" restore of the C dive so all the is back

 

Uninstall Acer GameZone. It's worthless and sometimes contains viruses.

 

Ok I know it seems petty but I thought mine was laggy until I opened up Acer's power management tool and realized that Acer had the CPU speed and Video performance on low when plugged in and after I changed those to maximum it fixed my problem.

 

Mine is laggy too and so i change to Dell cause i can't play anything on the Acer..
never knew there's something like a video performance setting..

 

That reminds me ...
The Power options.
Have they been set to Performance mode?
Usually they are set on 'Balanced' ... so I suggest you check there and set it to 'Performance'.

Personally, I never cared for the Acer third party software.
I never had the need to use it and most of the functions it offers can be accessed in Windows themselves.
It's an unnecessary bloatware that is over 5GB large and slows down the system.

Btw ... I don't think you need Acer programs in order to run blu-ray on your laptop.
I think you can easily do without it.
as for cinedash ... bah ... useless in my opinion really.

On a side note, you can easily remove the programs from Acer selectively.

Don't allow this stupid bloatware to slow you down, and reduce the resolution you are playing games at.

 

yeah i would always uninstall the bloatware, really can slow down a computer.

 

Playing Game at 1920x1080 with a 9600M GT will be laggy for sure and especially if you do not reduce the details settings too. I read many bad critics on GTA4 that it's laggy on any configuration and fully bugged.

On my Acer I've been able to play Left 4 Dead in medium settings with AF and AA2x @1366x768. I didn't get any lag. Anyway you have 4GB ram but it seems you have a Vista 32 bits that can use only 3GB, it may cause some lag because one of your memory is used partially, you may switch to Vista 64Bits. I've also noticed a lot of lag with the Vista 32 bits provided by ACER, since I use my own 64Bits version, it's more reactive and faster. I didn't notice any lag since then.

 

yeh power options, even better use NHC (notebook hardware control)

and make sure all the performance options are full.

this disables intel speedstep. intel speedstep is the devil

 

did our recommendations about the power options help?

 

Hey there just wanted to ask you something
I'm planning to install vista 64 bit on my laptop as well and I was wondering I you were able to find all the drivers you needed on the acer site. I've heard the blue ray driver doesn't have driver on vista 64 because there is no 64 version of acer player. Also are there any specific things I should do before I do this? I don't want to end up with a dead machine calling acer

Thx

 

Mine has been laggy too, very worse at moments :s
when I play c&c 3 sometimes it gets real slow and few minutes after it practically fast forwards , I'm not really sure what's wrong and there are other games I have problems with, really dissapointing and a bit frustrating
You have any solutions yet?

Thx

 

I have the same spec 8930 as yours and play Command & Conquer Tiberium Wars at full resolution (1920x1080) with most of the graphics at maximum, with no lag.

I did find there was a huge difference in performance between 'Balanced' mode vs 'High Performance' in the ePower Management settings. Be sure that the CPU speed and Graphics Power Mode is set to Maximum. Tweaking Vista a bit could help too.

 

Now that's something I don't understand, I can't max out the settings or it lags terribly :s
and power management is all at max:s
i'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here, there are practically no background tasks or whatsoever.

Could you please fill me in on what you specifically mean with tweaking? I've done a bit of msconfig, to shut down some unnecessary tasks...

I am planning on installing vista 64 bit version so I can use all my memory, not really sure If that will help alot

one more question, I know 32 bit version of vista uses only 3 gig's of memory but does this mean the video memory from my graph card also isn't being used?

THX!

 

For me, Left 4 Dead works flawlessly, on max. settings.

 

Well to anyone reading this, just one tip: install vista 64! I did it last weekend and the difference is amazing, I reinstalled c&c3 and before I could only play it on medium and even then at moments it lagged, now everything is maxed out and it works flawlessy! (with native drivers btw)

I remember some people here on the forums telling me installing windows 64 wouldn't make a lot of difference, meh, should've done it from the start!
Real improvement!