super jerky frame rates

[Guest]

For quite a while now, I have been experiencing very jerky performance even
on low-end games such as CS with my ATI Mobility Radeon. I can still remember
the first day I got my Dell Inspiron 9100 2.8 ghz, every game I played ran
with flawless smoothness. Now when I play CS, my frame rates would constanty
fluctuate between 10 and 60, resulting in horribly choppy performace. I've
tried every thing from overclocking to a clean partition of my hard drive and
reinstallment of Windows XP Home Edition. I've even e-mailed ATI for tech.
support, but twice they give me the same automated response that was no good
in solving my problem.

 

[Sandman]

Sounds like insufficient RAM or you need a new video card. Or both.

 

[Guest]

Sounds like insufficient RAM or you need a new video card. Or both.



I am using a ATI Mobility 9700 with 512MB ram, I believe it should more than suffice for Counter-Strike. I already mentioned that CS worked flawlessly at stable 60fps when I first got my laptop.

 

[Sandman]

O.K.....I don't know about laptops, (which is what you have?) but many times
people have complained to me that their video playback used to be fine, and
then began to suffer over time. Depending on who you ask; 512 RAM is
adequate to run XP, but 1meg of RAM would surely improve lagging video
performance..... Believe who you will. Just my first reaction/opinion on
this is RAM.......