I just recently reformatted my system:

1.2 athlon
383 mb ddr sd ram
gf3 ti500 vid card
sound blaster live
biostar m7mia mobo
windows 98 se

ive had this system for about 3 years now, and i've reformatted several times. i installed the supposed latest driver for geforce off nvidia's website, yet, when i play counter-strike, the game will freeze temporarily, then unfreeze for a little bit, then freeze again. Also, when the game isn't frozen, the fps is constantly spiking (never remaining idle). my computer is also pretty dusty. can dust really affect such a thing? how come installing the latest driver didnt solve the problem? what are some things i can do to improve my memory usage, and overall cpu efficiency. and most of all, how can i play counter-strike smoothly?? help!

Sometimes the latest driver is not the best driver.
Try different ones.

Yes, internal dust can cause a computer to overheat and affect its performance.
Gotta keep it clean.

thanks.


could someone please send me the driver they use for their gf3 ti500?

Also try cutting down on some of the applications running in the background. Start with msconfig and shut down all unnecessary programs that run at start up.

Click Start then Run and type msconfig, click the Start Up tab. Scan Registry, Task Monitor, Load Power Profile, System Tray and your antivirus should always stay, most of the rest can be disabled without problems. Microsoft Find Fast and Office Start up should always be disabled, Find Fast causes the system to access the drives quite often, resulting in an overall minor system performance drop.

Things like MSN Messenger, ICQ, AOL Messenger, Real Player, Winamp etc often need to be disabled through the program's preferences instead, check there first.

Get Hijack This (http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/index.html) and post a log here. Some of the folks here are pretty good at deciphering it. That will tell you if you have any resource hogging spyware or browser hijackers lurking in the background.