ACK! Rapidly declining PC performance!

Kenshinw95 · Oct 9, 2003, 10:48 PM

ACK! This is really annoying me to no end.

I have to re-install my XP home soon. I'm getting a persistant error message whenever I start XP.
"Can not find _-%#-%" It makes my "log in" take REALLY a long time. That's my 1st question.
Why's it doing that? I don't recall that being a valid filename for anything I've ever ran.

2nd, The most shocking, and most troubling of all.. Since I most likely have to re-install XP Home,
I figured I might as well see which Detonators my Geforce4 Ti4200 AGP 8X "likes best".
Well, while going through the various versions from 42.xx - 45.xx that I've heard the most favorable
things about from various places. Each time I remove one, I got into Safe Mode, and use Driver Cleaner 2,
and delete almost all references to it from my registry, so there's nothing of the pervious driver hanging
around to screw up the next one. Well.. it seems like everytime I put in a different driver, my GF4 gets
steadily slower perfomance. Like in Unreal Tournament 2003, I used to avg. about 45fps
& now I'm down to around 42. In Aquamark3, I started out with around 24 fps for an avg.
Then, with every driver version it gets steadily worse. I mean I'm now down to around 15fps.

What's wrong? I even tried overclocking my system, but that only yielded about 3 to 4 more fps than usual.
I even tried going back to my original drivers, but all for nought.

toddsmack2k · Oct 10, 2003, 04:27 PM

Well as some drivers releases go you may loose some peformance. I am sorry I dont have a Nvidia to see myself which drivers are fastest! As with it is in wondows over time you will loose some performance but not quite like what you are experiencing. Are you having any problems with artifacting or tearing along with each driver and the decrease in performance. You sadly may just be left to doing the fresh OS install to help this problems as well. I agree with you as I do not see how after every driver install you are losing so much FPS wise. Mostly b/c you are doing each install the right way and IMO you should not looose that much.

Kenshinw95 · Oct 11, 2003, 01:56 AM

I expected some difference in the drivers, but dang! I never thought it'd be so dramatic. Even those close in number to ones that're supposed be among the best gave those ratings. Recently, I installed Starstorm's 44.67q drivers, and my fps in general are higher than what I've been getting lately. Although, it's not up to what it used to be though.. I don;t think I'm getting artifacting.. Except maybe sometimes in the Chaos Legion demo, the shadows on the guy's ragged trenchcoat look more like spikes than shadows. And tearing.. Is that where a scene studders, or skips? It's like it jumped from frame 4 to frame 8?
Like in UT2k3 the DM-citadel benchmark. When the guy rounds the corner after it just starts up, it freezes for a second, and then it unfreezes, but skips forward to catch up.

THe BIOS has AGP 8X w/Fast writes on, but Side banding's disabled. Also 128MB AGP Aperature. Dual channel DDR 2100 Memory timings: 9-3-3-2.5 running sync. w/the stock FSB 133Mhz.