Stuttery video

[Greg Eickholt]

Whenever I play a game or DVD on my Toshiba satellite, it
starts out fine but soon develops a noticable stutter
every three or four seconds of gameplay, no matter what
the video setting. I have reburned my hard drive, cleaned
up my start-up files, and loaded DirectX 9.0. The problem
persists, and I did not have it before. Any suggestions?
I
am having trouble with Madden 2002 and Tiger Woods 2003,
as well as DVD play, and I have a Toshiba Satellite with
a
Trident Cyberblade video card. My drivers are up to date
and there appears to be no patches for Toshiba or the
games.
..

 

[John Davis]

Greg,

The problem may be your system. It appears that it is not powerful enough to
give you the frame rates you need for the demanding games you are trying to
play.

JDavis

 

[Greg Eickholt]

The problem is I used to be able to do these things....

 

[Dragonteeth]

The problem is I used to be able to do these things....

Hi Greg,

Have you run Defrag recently? If not, you should.
After using your machine for awhile, opening and closing programs,
installing new stuff, deleting, editing, etc. The files on your hard drive
can get pretty fragmented all over. The drive can handle things just fine,
in terms of reading the data sequentially, but all of that extra work can
have a very strongly adverse affect on graphic-intensive games -- affects
that you will see -- since the drive needs to look up all the data that it
must send to your video card.

If your drive is struggling to collect all that data, by having to hop
around here and there for it, you will very likely experience it as choppy,
clunky video.

1) Go to My Computer, and right-click on the hard drive.
2) Then choose Properties, and then click the Tools tab.
3) Select Defragmentation. Launch Defrag.
4) You may be interested in checking to see just how fragmented things
are.... do so by clicking the Analyze button... It will generate a small
report on the state of affairs....
5) When ready, click the Defrag button - it will probably take a good 20
mins or more, depending on the size of the drive, and the level of
defragmentation.

Defrag is your friend. You should run it once a month at least...depending
upon drive use, but especially if you use your machine every day.