Hi guys, I need some help,I have built a home PC but I must confess I blagged my way through. It has been running fine but now it seems to have slowed down. I have not changed any settings but programs take longer to start up and run slower, frame rates in games seem to also have dropped, I only have two games. GTA3 and FS2002. Both now run jerky. I was wondering if anyone could help? How fast should the system be running, what can it handel? I check the task manager and it says that the processor is running @ 2% when their are no applications running. Anyway, the specs are:Windows 2000AMD 1.47 Ghz processor256 mb DDR RAMGeForce2 MX400 64Mb Graphics cardASUS ACN 266-C Motherboard128 bit soundblaster soundcard. This really is confusing me, any help would be appreciated.CheersRic

Could be a number of things.Try these first though:1. Have you isntalled any software since these gaems ie MS Office, Antivirus software. If so, uninstall it and see if this improves any. 2. Check for any hardware conflicts. Sometimes a USB device (such as a joystick or mouse) can be on the same IRQ setting as the Graphics card. This can cause slow down.Starters for 10. Hope this helps.Michael H

Hi Ric. You didn't say whether or not you've done the basic disc cleanup and defraginng of the hard drive. If you do not do these on a regular basis, it's usually a good starting point to optimize your system's performance.2% processor usage at idle ( i.e. at the desktop with nothing else running) is not, I think, unusual; I usually run about 3-5 % on both processors on my system. FS2002 is processor intensive, my processor usage goes into the 30-65% range in dense or demanding scenery areas.System resources, I think tends to reflect the amount of RAM that is currently available or free; it's not the same as processor usage.Key point is to clean up the system if you haven't and to get rid of extraneous programs running in the background to improve your FS2002 performance.Hope some of that is of some use to you,Best Regards,Ed Green, [email protected]

Ric...see my above post OT: Computer tuneups, about computer problems, and two great web sites to deal with them...www.langa.comwww.pcpitstop.comSherm