Games run slower on XP than 98

[Saith]

I formatted my hard drive not to long ago and switched from 98 to XP. I just installed Oni and Neverwinter Nights yesterday. They both played flawlessly on 98, but are very very very choppy on XP? Anyone know what's wrong? Is it because XP eats up more RAM and doesn't leave enough for my games?

I have a AMD Athlon(tm) 998 MHz Processor and 384 MB of RAM.

[Saith]

Here is the system specs for the Oni game.

266mhz PII
64MB of RAM
3D Accelerator (2MB)
800MB of disk space
Windows 98/2000/ME

It doesn't require much but it's so laggy that it takes awhile just to select exit with the mouse on the main menu.

[javert]

It could be the RAM, especially if you have other programs running in the background. To check and see, you can download a system monitor program, like FreeMeter avaliable at http://www.tiler.com/freemeter/, to see if your RAM is maxed out while running the game.

Windows XP has a lot of services that are always running and consuming RAM. You can turn off the services that you don't need and free up as much as 50 MB of RAM or more. BlackViper's website is a great resource for freeing up RAM on Windows XP: http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm. If you turn off services, just be careful and make sure you know what you're doing...turning of a necessary service can render Windows useless.

[Saith]

When I installed XP I was surprised that I didn't have to install a driver for my second hard drive, or gamepad pro, or my graphics card like I had to do with 98. I think my problem might be that I need to install the driver for my GeForce 3 myself. Windows is using nv4.sys and nv4.dll. Those two files look like they would be for the GeForce 4.

Unfortunately the driver section of the Nvidia website doesn't seem to be working and the disc that came with my GeForce doesn't have the XP driver.

[bboysatch1]

your system specs. are not high enough for xp. you would need a medium qualitu computer to run windows xp well.

[chance]

bboysatch1 is very correct, that machine isnt enough.

[Trance_Allstar]

Make sure u D/L the latest drivers from nVidia. When windows autoinstalls them u never know what u get...

other than that i dont really know what u could do to fix it.
Might be some other device interfering, i know my soundcard has been bugging me a couple of times, and that is usually solved by turning off audio hardware acceleration under the Direct X diagnostics menu... Could be worth a try.

Other that just try with low detail levels and see if it chops less then.

Let us know how it works out

[Saith]

The driver section of the Nvidia website started to work again today so I downloaded their latest driver for my GeForce and now everything works just fine. I installed Call of Duty which is a lot newer than Oni and NWN and it works fine too.

[Trance_Allstar]

Im glad to hear!