ATTEN DEVS: cIV Runs as "Below Normal Priority" in XP

[oldStatesman]

I've never seen an app run in "Below Normal" priority by default. Did you all design it this way?

This may be a possibile cause of a large part of the stutter issues and other weird stuff going on. I will experiment with this and see if running it as a 'Normal" Priority App will help...

Screen of Task Manager with this highlighted attached.

 

[Eyemaze]

hmm that is pretty odd.

 

[oldStatesman]

I wanted to post this in Bug Reports...my bad for posting it in GD. Sorry!

 

[spymonkey]

It's possible that it's running below normal priority because it's minimized. The exact same thing happened with Guild Wars, where minimizing the game reduces its priority, wheras actually playing the game made it high priority again.

 

[Private Byrne]

Wow 41 prcesses, are you sure you havent got any spy ware running on your computer.

 

[oldStatesman]

Wow 41 prcesses, are you sure you havent got any spy ware running on your computer.

Nope - clean! A lot of those processes are security programs

It's possible that it's running below normal priority because it's minimized. The exact same thing happened with Guild Wars, where minimizing the game reduces its priority, wheras actually playing the game made it high priority again.

Thanks - this seems to be the case.

Howver, I just found running it in Windowed mode rather than Full Screen has eliminated most of the stutter in the movies - the Audio stutter is totally gone and the video stutter is very minimal now.

Aslo, now in Windows mode it goes all the way to Low Priority when minimized - so it tells me perhaps Windows mode is using less resources overall.

Windows mode can be selected in the civ4config file, this line:

; Specify whether to play in fullscreen mode 0/1/ask
FullScreen = ask

I switched it to ask so now it give me a prompt at start up which one I want to run - Full Screen or Windowed.

 

[ACEofHeart]

wow,,all those security programs??? you must work for CIA or Microsoft ..

 

[Richosh]

wow,,all those security programs??? you must work for CIA or Microsoft ..

Especially with many of these programms more than doubled ot three times. Definetey Microsoft

 

[gunnerxtr]

....umm ive always been afraid to mess with proccesses... and i have like 60 running lol... umm how do you know if its ok to close certain ones?

 

[Bal Ur]

....umm ive always been afraid to mess with proccesses... and i have like 60 running lol... umm how do you know if its ok to close certain ones?

That's the real trick, isn't it? To learn, I just closed each program and looked at my toolbar to see what shut off. In general, any program that has your name under "User Name" and is not a security program or explorer.exe is safe to turn off.

 

[OriginalGumby]

Whatever you do, DO NOT shut off System Idle Processes. VERY bad things will happen.

 

[Tactician Zhao]

....umm ive always been afraid to mess with proccesses... and i have like 60 running lol... umm how do you know if its ok to close certain ones?

one way you can judge (or at least find out what it is exactly) is referencing on a website.. this site has quite a few

http://www.processlibrary.com/directory/a/

 

[Eyemaze]

hijackthis and the relevant support forums for posting hijackthislogs are a great place to find out what your processes are and how to clean the bad ones

 

[weakciv]

www.theeldergeek.com
good info on streamlining your system

 

[Zhahz]

....umm ive always been afraid to mess with proccesses... and i have like 60 running lol... umm how do you know if its ok to close certain ones?

Depending on what you do with your PC and your comfort level, try googling keywords like 'optimize windows xp for gaming' and you can find lists of services that are otherwise always running on XP that you will never use and that you can easily disable. Marginal gains, but there's no reason to run processes you don't need.

 

[oldStatesman]

Depending on what you do with your PC and your comfort level, try googling keywords like 'optimize windows xp for gaming' and you can find lists of services that are otherwise always running on XP that you will never use and that you can easily disable. Marginal gains, but there's no reason to run processes you don't need.

Absolutely.

And no I do not work for MS - though I am a MS professional. As I said - most of the stuff is security and hardware monitoring apps - and though it looks like a lot it really isn't. It runs great.

Lots of site out there that can teach you how to optimize your system as Zhahz said. Just use a bit of caution - especially changing something like the priority.

 

[gunnerxtr]

thanks guys... if its marginal gains i wont mess with it too much

 

[Aeson]

If you have 60 processes running... it may end up giving significant performance gains by cutting that down. Plus, a lot of those processes could be spyware, trojans, or otherwise bad to have around on top of eating up memory and cpu cycles.

 

[oldStatesman]

If you have 60 processes running... it may end up giving significant performance gains by cutting that down. Plus, a lot of those processes could be spyware, trojans, or otherwise bad to have around on top of eating up memory and cpu cycles.

It may. However in my case I know what each and every one of those processes are - and they are not cutting down my performance. Six of them in my screenie are parts of the a/v program I run - (not Norton, then there would have been 10 or more , lol ). Two are for my laser printer, a couple are for my firewall, a couple are process monitoring apps, 3 are for task manager, most are XP system processes, and 2 are Civ4!

I agree though, if you don't know what is running, you can gain a lot of performance by learning about then and deciding if you need them or not. This is also a great place to check quickly to see if you have spyware/malware running. If you think you do, "Hijack This!" is a great app to have. You can use it to generate a report - and there are lots of web forums where folks will help you read it and improve your system performance if you are having issues.

 

[Undisclosed]

Just download Game XP and it will do everything for you. I just downloaded it and it changed my starting ram usage from 180 to 147! Big improvement there.