Background Programs May be my problem and yours.

[Eyie]

I have found after two weeks of late nights trying to figure out what was causing my computer to freeze during boss fights on raids the culprit may indeed have been as simple as turning off background programs pre-installed on my Dell when I ordered it. I have upgrades in every category software wise, thus I thought I was set. Unbeknownst to me Dell's have lots of junk on them which can be easily accessed through pressing control alt delete, and going to I believe the Processes section. Here you will have a list of programs that are running and taking up memory and interferring with your computers performance.

I have athlon 3200+, 940 ram, 80 gig hardrive, and this meets all the requirements for the game. Thus...SOMETHING has to work lol. Just do not believe the first people on the phone with Dell in particular. Geek squad and people here seem to have a much better grip on things. Ok Readon :)

I am just new to this whole thing, but I hope that my struggle will help someone out there new to gaming, and wanting to get rolling for thier son or daughter, (good excuse, we know the truth). The geek squad said that they would leave any programs that are listed as system, or Network. Otherwise everything else apparently can be stopped, and then started again if needed. They also suggested turning of Norton or antispyware, while playing and resuming after. (Not uninstalling, just temporarily disabling it).

I am imagining that somewhere a parent is pulling their hair out trying to figure out why the new computer they just bought with their last few dollars is not able to perform. I sooo hope this works for me as I will be finding out in the next few days. I am confident it will...otherwise it is just going to be Hail Mary's until their is a patron saint of PC gaming. God bless, noble mage Eyie

PS Bobby at the Best Buy in Mentor, Ohio, suggested around 36 programs running is what most computers run normally without additional junk on there. I am going to leave all my network and System programs running. Everything else..I plan on disabling. best of luck :) :sunny:

[AaManiac]

I have found after two weeks of late nights trying to figure out what was causing my computer to freeze during boss fights on raids the culprit may indeed have been as simple as turning off background programs pre-installed on my Dell when I ordered it. I have upgrades in every category software wise, thus I thought I was set. Unbeknownst to me Dell's have lots of junk on them which can be easily accessed through pressing control alt delete, and going to I believe the Processes section. Here you will have a list of programs that are running and taking up memory and interferring with your computers performance.

I have athlon 3200+, 940 ram, 80 gig hardrive, and this meets all the requirements for the game. Thus...SOMETHING has to work lol. Just do not believe the first people on the phone with Dell in particular. Geek squad and people here seem to have a much better grip on things. Ok Readon :)

I am just new to this whole thing, but I hope that my struggle will help someone out there new to gaming, and wanting to get rolling for thier son or daughter, (good excuse, we know the truth). The geek squad said that they would leave any programs that are listed as system, or Network. Otherwise everything else apparently can be stopped, and then started again if needed. They also suggested turning of Norton or antispyware, while playing and resuming after. (Not uninstalling, just temporarily disabling it).

I am imagining that somewhere a parent is pulling their hair out trying to figure out why the new computer they just bought with their last few dollars is not able to perform. I sooo hope this works for me as I will be finding out in the next few days. I am confident it will...otherwise it is just going to be Hail Mary's until their is a patron saint of PC gaming. God bless, noble mage Eyie

PS Bobby at the Best Buy in Mentor, Ohio, suggested around 36 programs running is what most computers run normally without additional junk on there. I am going to leave all my network and System programs running. Everything else..I plan on disabling. best of luck :) :sunny:



17 Processes FTW ^_^

-Maniac

[Clavina]

Good post with good advice Eyie! I'm sure a lot of people will find it helpful :grin:

I'd just like to add that most computer manufacturers will install a lot of 'helpful' software on new machines. Disabling process is ok but removing the programs that start the processes is better. The best (but probably the most annoying) way to clear the system is to do a clean reinstall of windows and only load on what you want to use.

Alternatively, go through the add/remove programs and remove the programs that are cluttering the system.

Also to disable the processes from starting every time go to Start > Run and type msconfig. This will list out all the programs that load when you start your machine with check boxes for each. Just disable what you don't want running in here.

One more thing, some process names are a bit cryptic so it isn't always clear what they do. If you find one like this just Google the name, you should be able to find out farely easily whether it's safe to disable or not.

[Eyie]

I have found after two weeks of late nights trying to figure out what was causing my computer to freeze during boss fights on raids the culprit may indeed have been as simple as turning off background programs pre-installed on my Dell when I ordered it. I have upgrades in every category software wise, thus I thought I was set. Unbeknownst to me Dell's have lots of junk on them which can be easily accessed through pressing control alt delete, and going to I believe the Processes section. Here you will have a list of programs that are running and taking up memory and interferring with your computers performance.

I have athlon 3200+, 940 ram, 80 gig hardrive, and this meets all the requirements for the game. Thus...SOMETHING has to work lol. Just do not believe the first people on the phone with Dell in particular. Geek squad and people here seem to have a much better grip on things. Ok Readon :)

I am just new to this whole thing, but I hope that my struggle will help someone out there new to gaming, and wanting to get rolling for thier son or daughter, (good excuse, we know the truth). The geek squad said that they would leave any programs that are listed as system, or Network. Otherwise everything else apparently can be stopped, and then started again if needed. They also suggested turning of Norton or antispyware, while playing and resuming after. (Not uninstalling, just temporarily disabling it).

I am imagining that somewhere a parent is pulling their hair out trying to figure out why the new computer they just bought with their last few dollars is not able to perform. I sooo hope this works for me as I will be finding out in the next few days. I am confident it will...otherwise it is just going to be Hail Mary's until their is a patron saint of PC gaming. God bless, noble mage Eyie

PS Bobby at the Best Buy in Mentor, Ohio, suggested around 36 programs running is what most computers run normally without additional junk on there. I am going to leave all my network and System programs running. Everything else..I plan on disabling. best of luck :) :sunny:

I got down to 32 processes. I was afraid to undo any system or network processes. One of the 'explorer.exe' processes cleared out my desktop and I just aobut flipped. All I saw was a blue screen that said,"Dell" and nothing else. Restarted and left that one going. Lastly, Geek squad said that Norton Internet Security was a huge issue and that it would interfere. He said if I did not browse the net while playing I would be safe while on the WoW server. Just be sure to start it up when I stop. Yet for the first time in several weeks last night I raided Onyxia and everything was crystal clear, and smoothly run. I had Norton turned off, and I think that was a big deal. That takes 99 MB I believe. I do not have more then a gig ram so my question is pretty much, if I get 2 gigs of ram, should I be able to run Norton and WoW without problems? (or minimization of things.)

(I did get several stops from the drivers apparently and a blue screen critical stop which I believe was from a driver problem on my video card. It said a number of things but freaked me out a bit. I still got back on again though. Another post to be put here. I got a note on the net saying a message from a driver was sent and not understood so it stopped the program. I reloaded the drivers from Nvidia site for Graphics Card, for Geforce and TNT, Windows XP/home but unsure if this was right. It did manage to work though for WoW. Anyhow, I am thinking of switching Anti-Virus if more ram will not help. Yet, Norton seems to be the best and most powerful program out there.)

[AaManiac]

http://www.processlibrary.com/
IS the tool of choice to get rid of all unecessary processes

also
START>RUN> "msconfig" >Enter
you can look thru all of you startup processes and go through those as well to even shave time off of boot up and restarts...


-Maniac

[Kalos]

We'd need to know your system specs to figure if more ram would help or weither it'd just be a complete waste. Having more than half a gig on a pentium 3 would be a waste and do absolutely nothing. On most systems, and with most modern variaties of Ram types it is always an improvement to go up to two gig. But it really does depend on the rest of the parts that make up the computer. Depending on your current graphics solution, a new dedicated graphics card might reveal a far more drastic improvement, or possibly a really weak graphics card could bottleneck the whole performance, making adding more ram a complete waste of time. The amount of ram that's best match up with the motherboard, the graphics card, and the central processor (and the operating system in some cases, Windows 98 for instance goes completely loco if you give it too much, more than half a gig, it just can't take it. Conversally Vista loves having 2 gig of ram, that's the preferred sweet spot for the operating system; compared with XP's 512mb/768mb sweet spot it's a significant increase).