Playing problems

Avelon · Post by **Avelon** » Wed May 24, 2006 11:19 am

I used to play Lugaru on Windows 98 SE, and that worked very nicely. There was little to no lag, menus were fast, animations were smooth.

Then I switched to XP and it went all to hell. No change in specs, obviously, but... I install the game, and run it. The red 'flash' takes several seconds to complete, and the cursor lags by almost a full second after moving it, then does a 'strobe' sort of movement, skipping right to where it would have ended up.
The game won't allow me to type a single letter - I have to hold down a key for almost a full second before the game recognizes it, and then it adds in 5 of that letter. This makes it impossible to create a user name or register the game.
Finally, when I attempt to open a scenario (challenge, tutorial, or campaign), the firey loading window comes up, VERY SLOWLY does its choppy, lagged-up animation for about 10 seconds (6 frames, tops), then freezes. The game stops responding and I find I have to end task to get it to close.

Even though my specs haven't changed from when I played the game before, here they are:

Windows XP Home (SP2)
AMD Duron 701Mhz processor
384MB SD-RAM
ATI Radeon 9000 AGP Pro (128MB)
Creative SB Live! Value (WDM)

Any suggestions?

»StaffShock« · Post by **»StaffShock«** » Wed May 24, 2006 12:27 pm

I think XP might be taking up more RAM than it's worth, but this is coming from a mac user, so I'm not sure. I don't really know how you could fix this, either. Maybe reinstalling 98 SE, or, if possible, giving the system less RAM and giving Lugaru more.

Zantalos · Post by **Zantalos** » Wed May 24, 2006 12:56 pm

Are other games affected? I had a video card problem After installing Ghost Recon, and the video card had to be re-put in (take it out, place it in). If not, it may just be xp takes too much, it has alot more pretty useless stuff than the 98 had. I dunno, play with the resolution or something, it seems like your computer can deffinately handle it with an xp though.

Oh yeah, OpenGl runs off of unused ram or something.

Avelon · Post by **Avelon** » Wed May 24, 2006 3:10 pm

I kicked the resolution down to 640x480 and the menus run way faster, but still 'strobe' and lag horribly. (It took several minutes to close the game before, and now I can do it in, oh...45 seconds?)
I think you're right, StaffShock. I know XP eats memory like cotton candy... I actually told a lie: I had 256MB of RAM before XP, and put in another 128MB afterward. Other games run as well or better than they did before I downgraded to XP, with a few exceptions (Like Warcraft II) that will not tolerate Microsoft's fecal operating system.

I tried swapping out the video card for an old one (*shudder* It was like a nightmare...) and then back. No change. I've also zeroed a lot of useless processes, which improved performance a little... But Explorer.exe takes ~50k of memory on low priority. I'm not intimate with soft settings in XP because the OS is a complete turnoff, but I guess I'll go find some (ugh) guides and see about slapping it around a little.

Thanks for the suggestions!

P.S. I have never touched COM2 intimately, I swear to Cheese.