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]

90% time problem = vista

basically you're hard disk is doing stuff, PB shouldn't cause this as it usually keep everything in memory (if it wrote to disk, it would be easiery for hackers to manipulate files on disk, which would be bad)

It's more likely vista getting up to something from time to time, main things to google and turn off:

Indexing
Superfetch
Windows Defender
Disk Defragmenter
Shadow copy/System restore.

Indexing, you can switch off in Services.
Superfetch is another service that causes disk thrashing. Microsoft's definition is: "Maintains and improves system performance over time." You can turn it off easily.
Windows Defender is set to auto scan by default. You can easily turn this off.
Disk Defragmenter is also set to auto defrag, which is easily turned off.

It's likely one of the above is doing a disk write which ties up you game

[m33amkii]

90% time problem = vista

basically you're hard disk is doing stuff, PB shouldn't cause this as it usually keep everything in memory (if it wrote to disk, it would be easiery for hackers to manipulate files on disk, which would be bad)

It's more likely vista getting up to something from time to time, main things to google and turn off:

Indexing
Superfetch
Windows Defender
Disk Defragmenter
Shadow copy/System restore.

Indexing, you can switch off in Services.
Superfetch is another service that causes disk thrashing. Microsoft's definition is: "Maintains and improves system performance over time." You can turn it off easily.
Windows Defender is set to auto scan by default. You can easily turn this off.
Disk Defragmenter is also set to auto defrag, which is easily turned off.

It's likely one of the above is doing a disk write which ties up you game

thanks mate, will try some of that. cheers!

[m33amkii]

done some of the above...is there any way of allocating say, 512MB ram for use in superfetch, or must i use all of my ram, or nothing at all?

[Magik5]

hehe

ive had this problem before, about 2 days ago in xp

vista x64 is now my main os (as of yesterday) -as i cba to reinstall xp atm - and games have played smoothly since

[m33amkii]

hehe

ive had this problem before, about 2 days ago in xp

vista x64 is now my main os (as of yesterday) -as i cba to reinstall xp atm - and games have played smoothly since

can you please translate that magik
no, seriously, what's CBA, ATM?
sorry!

[Magik5]

hehe

cba == cant be arsed

atm == at the moment



ive needed to reinstall xp for a while

bascially saying that the problem you have isnt necessarily down to vista

[m33amkii]

hehe

cba == cant be arsed

atm == at the moment



ive needed to reinstall xp for a while

bascially saying that the problem you have isnt necessarily down to vista

cool, i get the same feeling. vista isnt as bad as everyone makes it out to be!

cya at karkand!

[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)

[Magik5]

having 4gb of ram i dont care how much it uses, you have to remember vista is designed to run optimally with 4gb+. oh and dx10 in crysis hardly looks any different to dx9/xp to warrant having it installed just to play crysis

take it you dont know about the xp hack for crysis to get the dx10 features running. plus the fact that very high settings produce the dx10 textures etc, yet most pc's cant play it smoothly as of yet (the same reason vista uses so much ram - its designed for future pc's in mind). however im being a little hypocritical as i too use vista for crysis and bioshock - the two games that can primarily use dx10 atm

you can also turn off the "helpful" popups under user settings in cuntrol panel fucks me off to so i had to gert rid of them

and being the pc geek that you are, you should know windows loads any disk/disc drive drivers that are available under safe/normal mode - so your the retard for putting them there in the first place hehe

i do like linux though, but i have no need for it as im just a boring gamer so i have no use for it - do love playing nibbles though

oh and now having sp1 rc1 installed for vista, it seems a bit more responsive/less lag when you want to open appz etc

[m33amkii]

hmmm...i was on the server yesterday, and Ted was on also, and he's using XP. he did complain about his PC 'freezing' for a few seconds while his soldier waited patiently to get killed, and after a minute, mine started doing that also. i did notice that when that happened, my ping went up to like 190, and ted's did also when that happened to him. now question is did ping rise FIRST hence i got 'cut off' and the HDD started to spin for some reason, or did my hdd start spinning with some background stuff first, THEN my lag went up? it never happens in any other application/game to be honest, although i dont play any other game except for COH:OF online

does battlrecorder save straight to the server, or does it use temp files on one's HDD?

[Magik5]

sure monkey will correct me on this, but the outgoing packets you send to the server (include all the data you collect in game, e.g. kills/deaths/accuracy/time etc) go DIRECT to the server via udp (dont think field uses tcp?), which if there was to be a temp store, it would be server side, i.e. not on your pc.

imo it is most likely to be punkbuster/battlerecorder being twatish, or the server itself

seems a bit of a coincidence that it happened to you and ted in the same game... so i doubt the issues are related to your hardware

[m33amkii]

i must confess i was relieved ted was getting it also

highly annoying though, esp if you're getting killed like 4x per match (extra) due to the freeze. especially annoying if it's u that kills me magik5

i must say i feel well good when i get u with a headshot

[Magik5]

heh most people like to kill me / go out of there way to do so


i got the lag thing today, only once though

[m33amkii]

i have learnt something from u though, i've been using the l85 more and i imust say it's pretty damn good on single shot! almost as good as the g3

[Magik5]

heh who needs single shot - on any gun

learn to tap