Older Games running at 100%

[skirtboy]

On my XP Pro system, random games decide to run at 100% CPU usage, and run extremely poorly. I am running a Nvidia 7900 AGP video card with a 2 ghz athelon processor. A list of games (incomplete) in which this problem has shown up is:

Cossacks: European Wars
Homeworld
Doom 95
Doom 3
Starcraft
Driver
LEGO Creator

This happens with other games as well.

In every case, it is the game .exe that takes up the CPU. With the exception of Doom 3, not one of these games should stress my system, and everyone of them is XP compatible, as I've run them on many other computers.

Any ideas?

 

[Grathea]

Have you checked the .exe files for viruses?

 

[skirtboy]

This is immediately after game install, on a clean XP.

 

[candle]

what's your memory?

 

[Tohsaka]

How much ram do you have, and how many background applications are you running?

Could be an anti-virus too.

 

[e]

I know that certain badly designed maps in Starcraft will have tons of memory leaks, and over time can cripple your machine whilst SC is running. Couldn't say for the others.

 

[skirtboy]

Sorry I couldn't post sooner, I don't get online much lately. I've solved Doom3, my nVidia control panel was trying to use my secondary monitor. In all the other cases, it is older software, and the older the title, the more likely this is to occour.

I have 1 gig ram

 

[Nachos]

This happens with Half Life 1.. just with some computers.. other don't.

I have 256 RAM, GFORCE 2.1 ghz 64mb video and I can play those game great..

 

[Nachos]

Bad internet made me double-post :crazy:


ERASE

 

[Kraft]

Press control+alt+delete and in the task manager, click on the processes tab.  If the list of processes that you have running is really huge, than that could be your problem.  Also, take that list of processes, and sort them from smallest to largest.  Then look at the processes that are taking up the most space.  Generally the smaller ones dont really matter that much, but if you have any that are taking up just a ton of your RAM memory, then that is your problem.

Sometimes, if I know what program it is (aka, it is not a bunch of numbers, or something like SVCHOST) then I sometimes close it (end the process)

Be warned though, through trial and error I have found that if you close certain processes (mainly a certain one called .svchost) your computer will pop up a message that gives you 1 minute until your computer is restarted.  that is alright, nothing is wrong, you just have to restart the computer ^_^

Anyways, check those things, and see if any of that doesnt help ^_^

~Kraft

 

[candle]

Not all SVCHOSTs make you restart your computer, though.  Also, no matter what you do DO NOT end the process called explorer.exe.  That is your GUI.  You shut that down, and you will most likely have to do a hard reboot.

 

[Nachos]

No. If you close the Explorer.exe, It closes the desktop and windows bar. You just press control+alt+delete again, and execute "explorer.exe" or "explorer".

 

[skirtboy]

This is a clean install. The only processes running are my drivers and Windows. The game .exe itself runs at 100%, even if there are no other processes running.