Game become VERY sluggish

posted on December 30th, 2009, 8:59 pm

I just downloaded the Fleet Operations last night and love it.  I played a few game before the problem started.  I will be playing a game and suddenly the game makes my whole system sluggish, to the point that I usually dont even try to get to task manager I just kill the power to my system all together.  Even when I do press esc to get to the game menu its still very sow to navigate the menu.  I have tried closing out the game (takes a few minutes to do) and restarting but the game is still slow even in the main menu.  The only way that I seem to be able to get rid of it is to completely restart my computer, but it never fails that the problem will happen again.  Fleet Operations is the only thing that causes this.  I have tried turning the graphics down all the way and it makes no difference.  I run a Toshiba U205-S5057 Notebook with:
• Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T55004
o 1.66GHz, 2MB L2, 667MHz FSB with 64-bitC1
• 4096MB PC4200 DDR2 SDRAM
• Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 8MB-196MB
dynamically allocated shared graphics memory

posted on December 30th, 2009, 9:01 pm

Oh, and I upgraded to to Windows 7 Home Professional 32 Bit...

posted on December 30th, 2009, 9:07 pm

That seems like an integrated video card, is that right? Sometimes causes some issues as it isn't exactly meeting minimum specs. The rest of the machine seems fine though, so I don't know.

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posted on December 30th, 2009, 10:27 pm

From my slowness, this is a few tips:

Make sure you've installed every update so to fix bugs.

Make sure if you're using the laptop you have high performance on, in power settings 

posted on December 31st, 2009, 2:28 am

I made sure my laptop was on performance ss soon as I installed windows 7.  I was wndering if it was the video card but the only thing that kept me from leaning towards that is my laptop has played the first few games (3-4) just fine.  Armada II its self has never had any video problems and I have been playing that for the last month.

posted on December 31st, 2009, 4:16 pm

FO has a lot higher requirements than AII keep that in mind - you say you've been able to play FO just fine for a few games? Possibly try a reinstall in that case... maybe something got deleted. 

posted on January 4th, 2010, 2:41 am

And, strange as it may be to suggest, if you have Adobe Acrobat, make sure to shut off it's background process.

Acrobat/Acrotray has a nasty, nasty habit of consuming all your ram over time, and with an integrated video card like that, most of your video memory is actually your system ram.  If that's being eaten by an obnoxious program or a memory leak, you'll see slowdowns and possibly even lockups and crashes.

(I mention acrobat specifically because it's highly common, and really bad about that.)

posted on January 4th, 2010, 2:56 pm

Hmmm......... here is another tip. If there are any programs that start up upon login. Make sure that programs that come up like that is reduced to a minimum. Basically to do this go to run and type msconfig. There should be a start up section. Basically uncheck any non-system programs (with the exception of your VPN and maybe things linked to your security software). This will help you have more RAM to start with. And maybe it might allow some more games to be played before you get the lag.

But if this doesn't fix it. Upgrade your Video card. And may I suggest a Video card that has at least 512 MB available if not more. And don't just buy any card, you have to make sure the brand and the card is supported by the manufacturer of your laptop. Because ususally when it isn't, there can be problems getting it to work.

[DOCa Cola]

posted on January 10th, 2010, 2:17 am

Last edited by DOCa Cola on January 10th, 2010, 2:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

the gma950 is clearly not enough to play fleet operations. i've had the intel x3100 in my old notebook which roughly is twice as fast as the gma950 - it really wasn't much fun to play with it. i assume that the game is fast as long there is not much action on the screen and gets worse as the game progresses.
edit: sorry, you wrote that the game is still sluggish after reopening it or entering the escape menu. i am not really sure why this occurs to you, but then this may be unrelated to fleet operations at all...