[Sovereign110]

I have a friend with this computer (about 3 years old, and when he got it, it was refurbished):

Pentium 4 @ 2.80 GHz
510 MB RAM (Not sure where the other 2 went)
nVidia GeForce FX 5200 128MB video card
Integrated sound

It's a Dell, and it was giving him general system slowdown problems earlier. He hadn't ever reformatted and didn't maintain it very well overall, rarely defragging the hard drive or checking for spyware/virii. So I reformatted it for him. This did two things:

1) Increased the speed/overall performance for his entire system
2) Caused games that worked before (Like World of Warcraft) to perform horribly with lots of slowdown and random freezing

I downloaded all the drivers for him (video included) and he doesn't really have any problems except when it comes to playing certain games. Diablo II works fine for him, but Sacred does not. He used to be able to play WoW but now he can't. Anybody know what might be causing these problems? Thanks in advance.

 

[RonJr]

Did you check to see if the onboard video was disabled?

 

[Sovereign110]

How do you check that again?

 

[RonJr]

I dont remeber exactly right now bot go into your bios. Im just to lazy to reboot my computer....lol

It should be under Hardware in the bios. Then you can enable and disable anything in there.

 

[Sovereign110]

Alright I switched the integrated video setting from "Auto" to "AGP" and it hasn't fixed the problem. There are still long pauses and lag in games. DXDIAG also reports that there's still "510" MB of RAM.

 

[joshkp3]

sounds like he is using onboard graphics thats where the other 2 megabytes went, onboard graphics usually use some of the system ram as graphics memory, look in the back of the computer and see if he has another graphics card if he does thats why the games lag, if so disable the onboard graphics in the bios, when you disable it and restart the sytem wont reconize it and be forced to use the better card. in some cases you can use both graphics cards at the same time in a dual monitor senario.