Help with performance!!!

ok i recently bought halo for the PC, good game i installed it and it ran full spec with ease without reaching even 40% ram or cpu usage but in the last few days its began to lag majorly during multiplayer combat situations so much that i cant play properly and its begging to bug me alot, so i cleaned out the harddrive ran a defragmenter, virus scan and disk clean up abd to no avail, anyone got any ideas as to what i can do?

just a quick edit its struglging with most things ive handled before aswell even on the desktop its beggining to slow :/

 

How much total space does your hard drive have, and how much of it is free? For half-decent performance you should leave about 20% of your disk free, and for good performance 30% or over (rough numbers).

 

Have you checked the task manager to see if something is hogging your resources?

 

its a 320 GB sata hard drive with 206 GB free so i dont think its that plus i set that to high performance in the bios about a month back as for the task manager i had a look and will show you a full print screen of it

 

You have a XPS 1730 , by the looks of it.
First check your power plan, you may not be running on AC power and High Performance, and secondly, consider updating your graphics drivers.

 

Yes, check whether your laptop is pugged in when you game.

If you dont want the GPU to downclock when on battery, consider disabling PowerMizer, a member has post up a guide, just use search.

 

ok power was plugged in and yeah its a M1730 plus i downloaded the latest drivers from nVidia but they wernt WHQL certified just upgrades from there site should i consider downgrading them? and i dont think its a power issue as annoying as it is its defo plugged in :/

i searched the net and looked up and found dwm.exe ws responsible for memory hog issues, so i turned it off game ran perfectly, for a while i just re-booted my comp and its running slow again RAMs at 21% cpus steady between 2% to 6%

 

Try stopping DWM.exe again, just to make sure thats the root cause.
DWM is for the aero theme. Also, have you right clicked the games shortcut, gone to compatability and disabled visual themes? That might help.

 

ok so i stopped DWM again and it didnt work this time :| so i dunno if it was that i right clicked the shortcut and no compatiabilty came up :/ could it possibly be an overheating problem? as im on a glasss computer table?

 

You desk should not be them problem here, its only when you used the laptop on top of a fabric.

I can't help you much farther though, sorry. Just keep troubleshooting and 'Google'ing your problems.

 

ok thanks mate so i read elerons thread on laptop colling propped tha back of the laptop up... no change the general performance seems to suck beyond that of a pentium 4 :| any ideas anyone?

 

I think I can help you further diagnose the problem.

Get HWMonitor from here (the links are on top left, make sure you get 32-bit or 64-bit according to your system). Run it and let it keep track of your temperatures. Then play Halo, and when you notice a slowdown do ALT+TAB and record all the temperatures there (be quick because they will start going down when you stop playing). Let us know here what the temperatures are.

 

ok so i woke up this morning booted my comp and got a blue screen :| with the 0x00000007B inaccesible boot device, however when i pressed the windows media direct button the computer booted fine but this has happened to me before after i re-installed a fresh copy of windows after it happened before that i took it back to PC world and said the hard drives had come out of sync and that there was nothing they could do about it so they gave me another one but its just happened now is that a common problem with the M1730s?

 

ok did that and temps are as follows

GPU - 71 C (159F)
Core 0 - 71 C (159F)
Core 1 - 73 C (163F)
ACPI - 73 C (162F)

but shouldnt it pick up the 2 graphics cards that i have in here?

 

I'm not sure whether it should pick up the 2 GPUs, but those CPU temperatures look quite high for me. This page says that the CPU can handle up to 100 degrees Celsius, so that might not be the problem. Why don't you post those temperatures on a separate thread on the Alienware forum to compare to other users? Remember to specify that those temperatures are while playing Halo.

Still, if you know how to do it, and if it doesn't void the warranty, you could open up the laptop and clean the heatsink so the airflow is better. That helped on my girlfriend's old HP Pavilion zx5170, and if done properly, can only improve the laptop.

 

on the alienware you say ok mate ill have a look thanks

 

ok done also anywhere in the UK where i can get bottles air?