Slow refresh when coming out of a games?!?! HELP

[ASiDiE 0]

I am wondering if anyone else is having the same problem coming out of games. Lets say I got like 5 or 6 programs loaded on the screen (mirc, IM, IE, Gamespy arcade) I go in to the game.. and play.. and when I come out... it must take 15 seconds or LONGER to bring up all the windows... it's like I am on a 486 or something. Even if windows are not open still seems to take a long time. The Hard drive is just going crazy at this point in time... trying to load all thoes windows back in. Has anyone see this problem before? I got 256 meg of ram.. I would think that would be enough on my gaming machine. I thought it might be my Hard drive being ATA66 and all but the jumping up ATA100 isn't that much of an improvment. Here are my system specs:

 

Athlon 1.4@1.6

40g Maxtor ATA 66 Drive

Abit KG7-Lite

256 DDR ram

Gainward Geforce3 @ 220/540 /w 23.11 offical

SB audigy

Windows XP Final

 

So it's not like I have a slow machine or something. If anyone of you guys have seen this.... and maybe fixed it with doing something (adding ram.. new hard drive.. different Nvidida drivers) Please let me know.

 

ASiDiE

[ThC 129 0]

It depends on the game, and the API. Ive seen many games redraw very slow when exiting especially when exiting. It also depends on the programs you are running too, and what they have to render. You have to remeber that IE on average uses up about 20-30 megs of RAM, Explorer uses on average another 20-30, gamespy arcade around 10, ICQ/AIM/etc, use about another 5-10, mIRC around the same. So already without even including what the kernal and system processes are taking up we are already using up around 100 megs of RAM. So now you load up a game on top of those, that game will use between 60-100 megs of RAM, so while your running the game your pushing the upper limits of your RAM, and causing many processes to be paged to disk. Now once we exit the game all this free space is available, so the OS takes everything that was paged on disk and moves it back into RAM.

 

So in the end it looks like it is the amount of programs your running at the same time, the amount of RAM you have and the UDMA/66 limit on your hard disk.

 

 

So your most logical upgrade would be a 512 stick of PC2100 DDR ram, or buy a new KR7A-133RAID and some ATA/133 Hard drives

[CUViper 0]

The easiest way to tell if RAM is the problem is to go to the performance tab of task manager, and check the "Commit Charge (K) - Peak" value. This is the maximum amount of RAM (in KB) that you have used at one time since your computer was last restarted. Your 256 MB of RAM translates to 262144 KB, so if your peak is near or above this number, you need to get some more RAM.