Technical Difficulties -- Advice Required

[Aelorean]

I'm having a bug with my system that I'm fairly certain is related to the video card, but I'm not certain how.

Essentially, I first noticed it when I tried running EQ and noticed that it was taking F O R E V E R to load! So, I thought I would fix it by clearing the installation and reinstalling. Same problem... In fact, I can't get into the game at all. After about 10 minutes I can get to character selection, but then it never allows me in the game. (I also tried going with the default UI as well).

Then, I noticed that anything that I ran that used (what I'm assuming is graphics acceleration) is running WAY slow. For example, Even running a 2meg avi file on my computer now takes a LONG time to come up and runs very slow and jumpy.
Also...some webpages that have flash, etc.. are slow and impossible.

Nothing else seems to be the matter, and I've defragmented the drive. 2D stuff seems to be fine (ie, Windows in general)


So...does this sound like I have a video problem? And, if so, what card should I get that would be available at Best Buy or something in town?

Thanks!

[Herbert Dypp]

may not necessarily be the video card. first thing i'd try would be to ensure you have the correct motherboard drivers (find out if it uses VIA4-in-1). If you've never updated them yourself, the chances are that they're out of date. Then, update/re-install DirectX, and then update/re-install your Vid Card drivers.

i'd also be interested to know how much RAM you have, How much HardDrive space you have(free & used), and what video card you are using.

[Beltalek]

Not sure if this is appliciable or not, because I'm not sure what OS you are using.

One thing I'd try is downloading a new install file for your video drivers, then booting into Safe Mode and removing ALL instances of the currently active video drivers. I know it was true under Win/98 that you could have multiple copies of the video drivers running that would cause problems like this.

Another thing to check: Make sure you video, sound, and network cards are all on separate IRQs if at all possible.

Set your virtual memory setting to 0, reboot (to delete the old swap file), then change the setting to a fixed size of twice your real memory size (then reboot again). This cleans out any corruption that might have gotten into the swap file. This is one of the first things I do when doing ANY debugging.

Try turning off any antivirus software before running EQ (this is just a test to see if the av software is causing contention).