Weird Computer lag issues

[Greg12]

For about 2 months I have noticed something weird with my dell XPS laptop. It has an 800MHZ system bus, 3.4ghz P4 with hyperthreading, 512ram and an ATI 9800 graphics card in it.

By all means, this system should be able to do things in a snap, however in the last 2 months, I have noticed an ungodly lag. Rome Total War, which plays fine on my 2.8ghz Intel Extreme Graphics system at home, is unplayable on my laptop because everything lags soooooo much. Movies play in freeze frame, you "jump across the map" and other stuff. This is not what a high power system is supposed to do.

Also, I run AUTOGK alot and it used to be really fast. On my 866mhz laptop, it couldd do a 30 minute divx conversion in 1 hour 20 minutes. When I first got this laptop, it could do it in 40 minutes. Now it takes 8 hours and it says only 50% of first pass done. I checked and I noticed that the program is automatically getting assigned a low priority.

In general, everything is very laggy, and while I can use my system, it is VERY annoying.

I have reformatted 6 times using 3 different downloads of Windows XP CD Images.

I am wondering if the graphics card is going bad or if some soders and loose on the cpu.

[redwudz]

When you reformat, are you using the discs that came with the laptop? On my laptop, when I tried to use a regular XP install, the computer ran slow. Never figured that out. Apparently the manufacturer uses a different setup with a laptop. Anyway, I went back to the supplied restore system discs and everything works fine. I just have to take all the crap off my system that they install and update windows.

You might run a benchmarking utility like SiSandra and check your results to narrow down where the slowdown is occurring. This utility will test most of your system components and you may find the problem. http://www.overclockersclub.com/downloadcenter/download.php?action=file&id=12

[Greg12]

The computer came wirth an OEM Windows XP CD. It doesn't look like it would be special.

[handyguy]

There is something called 'content indexing' you might want to turn it off.
http://www.gadgetopia.com/2005/01/25/MicrosoftsContentIndexingService.html

You might make sure your HD shows up in the bios & is not set to Pio mode.

[glockjs]

heat maybe? have you tried watching your temps with a proggy like mbm5?

[Greg12]

My hard drive is running at Ultra DMA Mode 5 and my DVD-Rom Multi-Word DMA Mode 2.

I am going to try the heat thing.