Please help...Constant Game Freeze

Hi people.

I have a lap top with:

AMD athlon 64 processor
1024 ram
60odd gig hard drive (nearly full)
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 (which the supplier, novatech informed me was 128mg)

The issue is that during some games the game will load up begin perfectly well and then freeze after about 5 secs. This always happens with some games, and never with others. so that some games never work while others always do.

After consulting the company they said the laptop was too old, but I am not convinced for several reasons most notably that the the games that traditionaly freeze had untill company of heroes and medieval 2 total war all been old.

Rome total war works fine, as does oblivion (although this overheats and crashes every hour or so), star wars and dawn of Warboth also work without issue.

Meanwhile oldies like command and conquer generals (akin but worse than dawn of war) freeze on opening. Funnily enough neverwinter nights another oldie that suffers the same problem said i didnt have enough ram which i find bizzare as I have 1024mg ram.

After reading the readme on medieval it said some video cards dont let you access all 128mgs and you need to play with the bios which is beyond me so i started reading about video or graphic card issues ( i don't know the difference).

Having read some of these threads i thought it sounded a little like a graphic card issue, but I am not technically minded so I can't figure it out. I was hoping some kind hearted clever soul could lend their ear and help me out.


If anyone has read all the way down here you have the patience of a saint. Any advice that i9s cheaper than buying a new laptop would be much appreciated as I really love the total war games and want to play this new one.

thanks for reading

dan

 

Update Video Card Drivers

Get More RAM

Patch Your Games


other than that I dunno, the laptop seems pretty old, you should start saving up.

 

in addition to what usapatriot said, clean your heatsink and fans, get rid of excess dust (search the forum if you need help)

and the obvious:

defrag
close out extra programs
scan for spyware/viruses

 

thanks guys, Im just going to try to push my luck here: How do I get new drivers that are secure and which ones work for a 9600 mobility?

 

www.omegadrivers.net

Best drivers out there for mobile Radeons. You should see a major performance increase as well as stability and features. I used to have a 9600.

 

Thanks very much i hope some day ill be able to help

 

As rickster mentioned earlier, the cooling guide may help you bring the temperatures down some.

Also make sure you have the latest patches installed for your games as usapatriot mentioned. As long as you're meeting the minimum requirements of the games, you should be able to get at least poor performance out of them.

 

Check your RAM, run a mem test.

 

thanks one and all, I eventually put the omega driver on and it seems to work perfectly as do the games. thanks a lot

 

Good to hear.