Acer Gemstone Blue slowdown

I've been playing Half Life 2 and noticing it's a bit bumpy, especially when I look around. I see no reason why there should be any slowdown on a laptop of this spec with a fairly old game.

What options should I flick to improve performance a bit and where? What's the best graphic driver to have?

 

what r ur specs and did u remember to uninstall all of the bloatware? bloatware n stuff can rly slow down ur computer. it could also be the resolution ur playing at. turn down AA and depending on the resolution, turn that down as well.

 

hellloo P u there?

 

AA doesn't seem to work for some reason. I disabled a lot of the services. Resolution is native.

The Gemstone Blue has a 9500M GS and can handle Crysis fairly smoothly on medium.

 

Hi Kittie Rose. How long does your battery last? Long enough for your train journey I hope.

When I got my Gemstone Blue I was initially impressed with how it handled games like M2TW, Grid and Medal of Honour Airbourne. But as the weeks went by I encountered frequent

Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding, but has succesfully recovered

messages.

I eventually decided to install a dual boot with vista for work and xp for games. I finished it this morning and so far SBK 08 runs perfectly at max settings when booted into xp. When i was using vista i had that error message every 5 minutes with it running at lowest specs.

You sound like you are more clued up than I, however I recommend a dual boot.

 

Is it hard to install XP?

Also, HL2 is still slowing down on me

 

I had some slowdown issues in Team Fortress 2 as well - after a while, things just ground to a halt.
I thought it was something to do with audiodg.exe, since I saw that used up a buttload of CPU, but I'll have to check again now that my system is back from the service center.

EDIT: Same issue - after a few minutes of playing, audiodg.exe's CPU usage spikes so that it and TF2 are battling for room on the processor, causing a slowdown of epic proportions.
And, of course, if I turn off my sound effects, my Tuba subwoofer becomes useless.
*groan*

 

Sorry for the double-post, but I just discovered the reason for my slowdown - my GPU was downclocking itself midgame!
Using GPU-Z, I was able to see that despite hitting a max of 70 degrees Celsius (the danger zone is around 80-85), the thing slowed down right in the middle of a game.
Thus, I'll use the advice from this thread here on the forums to fix that.

If anyone else is having issues, I'd recommend seeing if you have the same issue.

EDIT:Never mind...system is still being slowed down by audiodg.exe. I am NOT a big fan of this part of Vista - good sound or a playable game, but not BOTH.

 

The solution to the slowdown in Half Life 2 is to defrag the files. It is an option in steam, you`ll have to right click the game you wish to defrag. I found this out after I was having issues with CS:S, and did a search in the valve forums.

 

I finally did it so I can't say it is hard. It was however a big challenge for me.

The complete details of how I did it are here

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=265750

Its been a week or so now since the recovery of the Vista partition and creation of the XP boot. Whilst it seems that this time Vista is more stable when gaming, there are times when it feels not quite right. In XP I never have to worry about it. It just works.

I am happy with the dual boot, Vista is great for work and almost everything else. XP is for when I am feeling lazy.

 

I actually managed to create a quad boot system (that's right, QUAD boot).

Windows Vista Business SP1 32Bit
Windows XP Professional SP3 32Bit
Windows Vista Business SP1 64Bit
Ubuntu Hardy Heron

XP by far was the worst to get working, especially with the SATA drive in native mode. I had to do some crazy stuff to get the drivers extracted from the Intel installer and then manually install it while running in IDE mode.