punkbuster working in background?, pc lag/freeze Options

[m33amkii]

hi guys, i wonder whether or not any of you have expeienced this before? :

playing on the server, suddenly the game freezes (and the sound etc) and the HDD LED lights up (HDD in use) and screen stays frozen for a few seconds. in the meantime, i get owned by magik5 or some other tramp , and i 'wake up' to the 'critically wounded' screen (cos of course, everyone-else's game has kept going)

this does not happen just once, but a few times in succession, for about 5-8 seconds each time.

i wonder whether it is PB trying to take a SS of me, and re-trying every time due to lack of success or something. i have no other background programs running, except vista windows updater or whatever and kaspersky I/S.

running vista x64 home premium, and lates punkbuster outfit

also poor k/d ratio when this happens , making me look like a dick

any suggestions?

[MonkeyFiend]

a quick question - have you tried running bf2 with 'high priority' so that other processes are given a lower priority?

As for vista I have XP, Ubuntu and Vista. XP is the main OS, Ubuntu for some dev stuff, serving, recovery and vista primarily to play crysis in DX10.

As a general rule I don't like vista - RAM use is much higher than is necessary and I hate stuff popping up all the time trying to be helpful. When I installed crysis I mistakenly tried to mount a virtual drive for XP - as expected the computer crashed. Fair enough, my bad.
What I found appalling was the vista not only kept crashing when it tried to load the driver each time it started up, but when I tried using safe mode - the driver still loaded and bluescreened the computer; which frankly is retarded. I ended up having to rip the files out using the ubuntu partition (this is roughly reason number 86 in ' 101 reasons why vista can sucks my balls)