Stutters?

[therock]

I've been having a problem since sometime around November or September of last year with my FPS. I'm running an Nvidia GeForce 7950GT, I have two gigs of RAM, and my processor is an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 'Orleans'.
I can't recall what started it but here's what my problem is. I'd just recently purchased The Orange Box, and went home to enjoy it. Portal, Team Fortress Two, everything in it worked fine. I was probably getting around 40 to 70 fps. Shortly thereafter, things got incredibly sluggish. I could play a round of TF2 for about 1 full minute at 30 FPS then it would drop to 5 or 6. Not Good. I wasn't sure how to diagnose the problem, so I just avoided playing those games. My FPS in Train Simulator however was also dropping like a brick. I was maxing 20-25 FPS on Seligman! The Payware Cajon w/ Marc's upgrade was tanked at around 10-15. Very Not Good. So in January I grabbed a copy of Rail Simulator from the local EB Games. This, not surprisingly, was also very laggy and stuttery. All these games still behave this way, and I'm not sure why. I've dropped the settings in TF2 / Portal to the absolute minimum and they still lag like there's no tomorrow. I'm really unsure as to what the problem is. Anyone have any thoughts? I just recently reformatted about a week ago, and all my drivers are up to date... :confused:

[CSX4878]

Are you using Windows Vista?

[therock]

Nope, XP Media Center

[CSX4878]

Hmm, This is the first time of me hearing about stutters on XP. I am so use to this darn Vista, I can't remember what to do with XP. =[

Have you tried a virus scan, or seeing what processes are running that aren't needed?

[therock]

I've run avast countless times since then, and my computer's running the minimum amount of programs when I'm playing them

[CSX4878]

hmm, did you uninstall everything included in "the orange box" and do a restart to the computer?

It sounds like either the programs from the thing you bought is the cause, or the settings on your system somehow changed. I am not sure, as I said, I am clueless to XP now that I have Vista.

[therock]

Nope, like I said, I did a full system reformat about a week ago, everything (including Rail Sim) is still buggy

[baldwin]

So you did a reformat and reinstalled the XP system. That will give a clean platform to start from.

What else have you reinstalled. RS, MSTS, and did you test each one before adding the next?

I think your problem is Orange Box content. This is from Valve and adds the Steam environment to your system. This has been known to develop memory leaks and cause symptoms like you describe.

Mervyn

[therock]

I'm testing software as I install it. MSTS was first, then RS and both displayed the same symptoms as before.

[pstraten]

Have you looked at Task Manager > Processes to see if some newly installed program hogging your system resources? Just a thought...