I have a pretty nice PC, but my FPS blows.

[Bryant]

Okay, I get about 15 FPS everywhere, and sometimes the game will freeze for about a second, and sometimes more, while doing some things. Sometimes sounds play when I lag, so thats what I think is triggering it, but I even get 15FPS when I play with sound off. I also play with everything on low, and I think its the 1024X760 res, or whatever is closest to that.

My friend just brought to my attention about defragging my PC. I have not done this since I bought the computer (I've always been scarred to. I heard you can screw your hardrive over if you do it too much, so I never did it ), so do you think that may be the problem?

Specs:
2.66 MHz Intel
768 RAM
128 MB Geforce FX 5000 (PCI slot)

My mobo is stock, by the way, but I don't think my chipset would hold me back that much.

I know a pretty good deal about computers, so fire away at what you think the problem may be.

[RizzleM]

Your bottleneck will be your graphics card in the PCI slot. The PCI bus is old now and doesn't have the same throughput as say AGP or PCI-E. If you switch to the exact same gfx card but in a AGP format you'll probably see a 10-20% improvement in performance - simply because of the bandwidth that AGP allows.

Defragging your hard disk shouldn't be that much of an issue - it will help, but mainly on loading the game and different zones - you have an adequate amount of RAM so the game shouldn't need to grab data off the HDD that often.

Try switching down to 800x600 in-game, you'll lose screen real estate but should get higher FPS.

[Bryant]

Unfourtunently I'm limited to only PCI. I have no AGP or PCI-E slots on my mobo.

There is actually a post on the main technical boards about several people having the exact same problem after the 1.10 patch. I don't know if I can link it here but the post is called something like "Prblems after 1.10." Blizz seems to be ignoring it a little bit... They have posted twice on the topic, but they didn't give any input on the prblem, really.

[Herald of Doom]

Upgrade mobo+gfx card. I can't find the fx5000 on nvidias site, but a pci slot severely limits the performance of your card. I've had a pci slot on one of my old comps which was the reason i upgraded at the time (got a really new one now, had one with amd 2200+ and one 1gig with 9600 pro before that one and the one before the second had a pci slot :p ). Blizzard stats in their requirements a gforce2 is minimum and an fx5700 is recommended but I don't know how yours compares to those two :) So either switch down to 800x600 or upgrade I'd say.

HoD