Games sometimes "stutter" on my 9400

Hi Guys!

As I played some games on my Inspiron 9400 the last days, I noticed that some games occasionally get kinda stuck for about 0.1 sec or so. It's like the brief jerking when the game is saved automatically.

It happens most likely in situations where new objects have to be loaded and I think it has to do with the HDD, because most times when the game halts for an instant, I can hear the HDD working.

Anyone else who has got this?

Do you think the HDD is a bit too slow (5400RPM) or should I turn off everything which might access the HDD whilst gaming, such as antivir or firewall?

It happens also to me when I play CoD1 from 2003, so it has probably nothing to do with too high graphics settings or not enough Ram. I remeber I also had this on my old desktop PC, butI always thought that this was because it's just too slow in general..

Greets
Tobi

 

More ram would be the best answer, the hard drive should be out of play during gaming, it should pretty much only be spinning to load the levels.

 

But I can't imagine 1GB isn't enough for a game which requires 128MB... For newer games which demand 512 or more, I agree that more ram wouldn't be too bad.

 

Defrag the drive.Sometimes the game data packs get horribly fragmented.Once when I noticed Warcraft 3's low performance I ran the scan... one of the data pack was in 300+ fragments

 

Hi!

This might be the solution! Didn't think about it because I defraged it only 2 or three weeks ago, but I just checked it and saw that the Call of Duty files are fragmented like hell. One 150MB file is almost 400 fragments... This would explain why exactly this rather old game stutters, while CoD2 and other newer games don't. I'll run the defrag and then try it again, but I think this must be it.

Greets
Tobi