Help w/ 7600 GeForce Go

kelston

I made a mention of it on the laptop forums but it's not getting many views and i'm really hoping to try and get it fixed.

Running a laptop with Core Duo 2.0GHz and a 7600 GeForce Go. Both are set to max performance instead of the power saving features.

It's able to pull respectable fps, 60fps locked in WoW, 40ish in NWN2. However, a lot of the time, it'll end up dropping below 10fps and staying there. The only way I can "fix" it is to force the game to reload it's graphics engine over and over again. Eventually, that will seem to cause something within the laptop to spin back up and my fps goes back to playable.

Any thoughts?

fobis

Have you tried different drivers?

kelston

Aye, it was the first thing I tried, video card wise. Though i'm not sure where (or if I even could) get different CPU drivers, scouring Intel's site was a bust.

fobis

Well, I know that the 7600 GO is not exactly a gaming powerhouse... but for it to stay under 10FPS is a little scary.
Are you sure something else isn't going on? Harddrive going crazy? Tons of other programs clogging up RAM, etc?
Check those things if you haven't already.

kelston

The one thing that was suggested to me that I guess could make sense was hard drive paging -> having to prefetch game data over and over on a laptop drive which loves to spin down for power saving.

If it didn't come with the slew of other weird problems, i'd go with that and accept it as a side effect of having to game on a non-too-awesome laptop.

However, wacky other things which also occur:

- System clock loves to reset itself to like 2003 or so
- Likes to occasionally turn itself off when plugging in the power cord

I'd like to give Alienware a piece of my mind, such terribility

fobis

The system clock resetting is definitely a sympton of a bad BIOS battery...
Yeah, I'd definitely give Alienware a call and get them to fix your problems since you probably did pay tons for it (being Alienware and all).