Random slowdowns

[niko82!]

Latelly i've had problems with some major slowdowns in Conquests. They happen periodically when playing the game, once per maybe 2 minutes (this differs) and last for maybe 30 seconds. When checking the task manager it goes up from normal 30% (by civ3) to 60% during the slowdowns, if i don't do anything. It hits 100% as soon as i scroll in the game, or do anything else.

I upgraded to xp a while ago, and the slowdowns began at the same time, so i suspect that's the source of the problem. I've never had any problem before, both when using win2000 and win98.

The specs:
Toshiba Satellite 1900 s101, P4 1600 MHz
768 MB ram
Radeon mobile with Omega drivers 3.8.252 (problematic to use official ati drivers, and original toshiba drivers are really old)

On a side note, before upgrading i had only 256 MB ram, and civ 3 still ran totally ok as long as i didn't use gigantic maps.

Thanks if anyone can help!
Niko

 

[Quintillus]

Just making sure, these slowdowns occur while it's your turn, right? If it's during the in between turns, the slowdowns are entirely normal!

The most common cause of slowdowns is recalculating trade routes, which occurs whenever a city is captured, a road is built or destroyed, or a harbor/airport is built. See if the slowdowns correspond to these events. Usually the slowdown is not noticeable, but on very large maps with very many civs they are noticeable, even on processors much more powerful than your own. However, on small maps recalculating trade routes won't cause a noticeable delay even on a Pentium II machine, much less powerful than yours.

Otherwise, Windows XP itself shouldn't be the cause of the problem. I've run CivIII with great stability XP for years. Are you sure your drivers are correct and for XP? Also consider if a new antivirus/firewall may be interfering with Civ/not giving it adequate permissions.

I wouldn't be worried about the 100% CPU usage. I'm pretty sure it does that no matter what CPU you have.

 

[niko82!]

As far as i've noticed the slowdowns are completely random. They occur in the middle of play, not bound to any special action and definitely not just when in between turns. Often i just notice that all animations get very skippy (ie workers) and if i right click on the map, or do anything else for that matter, everything is really slow, making it a pain to play for 30 seconds or so.

The thing is that i've never had any problem with this before with win98 or 2000, and i've also been playing the game for years now, so i've pretty much experienced any setup or map size before. Because of this, i'm quite sure that it has to do with some service winxp or some other application runs. Howerver, my system should be clean and nothing should disturb as i've turned of automatic updates and the like, and i've made sure no antivirus/spyware software runs when i play the game.

As for drivers, these have always been a problem when it comes to my gfx card. The only ones i've had success with are the omega ones, and those are exactly the same as i used with win2000 (they are win2000/xp compatible according to the omega site). I've tried to change versions back and forth, with no performance difference. I also managed to install the offical ati radeon drivers, with the only result that i got was a lot of strange errors and glitches.

I think i'll try to install new chipset drivers and see if that helps. The orignal microsoft ones say intel 82001 ba/bam and all that, which is correct, but since they are dated 2001, maybe they are buggy.

However, any help is appreciated! It's no fun to not be able to play civ 3 normally....