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Ever since I got this ‘ere delightful laptop back in November things haven’t felt quite right.

Randomly I get these little freezes like my game has been paused and unpaused for half a second.

As you can imagine it’s a bit annoying but I still find it playable enough; some days it seems worse than others and some days I barely notice it.

I’ve done some research and poking around but I’ve never really found any conclusive answer. There are people with similar problems but not exactly the same, so I had just put it down to Realtek on-board sound not getting on with Valve’s engines (I get it in GoldSrc too but not in L4D or any other game).

To illustrate my problem I’ve uploaded a short demo of me faffing around on Store here.
If you stick on net_graph 4 you should be able to see “gaps” in the net graph when the freezes occur, roughly every 25-35 seconds.

I took a few screens of my net graph too if you can’t be arsed to check the demo out.
The first three are on populated servers and you can see the “gaps” where the freeze occurred.

The last two are me running around on an empty internet server, the freeze occurred where the two lower green lines separate like a little rolling hill. You can see this happening in the first three images as well.

One, Two, Three
Four, Five

One might think this was a net problem but the freezing also occurs when I play on a offline or LAN server like tr_rocket_shooting2 etc.

So I’m hoping someone can provide some insight on my issues.

<3

Now I have to download your bloody demo to see if its the same problem I have :(

Could be that wireless zero configuration thingy maybe.

What temps are your cpu & gpu running at when gaming?

Defrag HDD?

I actually used to use the wireless but I changed to wired but it made no noticeable difference.

As for dualcore support I am pretty sure it happens with both.
I actually went to test it out there and it only gave my a little freeze once in 10 minutes on either setting.
Such is the intermittent nature of the problem.
Bizarre :D

In TF2 I am running in 1680*1050 in a borderless window on DX9 using a modified m0re’s config and I get around 80-100 in a 6v6 game.
On pub this can go as low as 40-50.

Oh my OS is Vista Home 32bit with a lot of the crap turned off, and I disable my anti-virus (ESET NOD32 v4) when I play games.

It may be the wireless zero service still running, even if you don’t have wireless.

I have tweaked all my Vista services, WZC is definitely disabled.

Although I have tried running it on Windows Server2008 64bit from another partition and it had the same problems but it was still accessing the same TF2 install.

So I’ve just sort of been assuming its something like a wonky driver creating an interrupt, but the weird thing is it doesn’t happen at regular intervals.

Perhaps I will reformat some time; need some external storage first D:

Yeah SMB, the symptoms do seem a little like that particularly the randomness.
But I play arguably more demanding titles like GTA4, UT3, Crysis and FarCry2 with no problems.

I will check it out though.
What software is best to monitor heat etc?

Admirable: SpeedFan is a useful tool