World Of Warcraft And Vista With Choppy Frame Rates

[rayzoredge 2]

I am simply irate as to not knowing why this is happening.My friend is running Vista Home Basic. Apparently it was working well until I touched the machine and optimized Vista, disabling services that she didn't need and turning off the eye candy that would slow the machine down. (It's a Dell Inspiron 1501, by the way.) Now when she runs World of Warcraft in her usual windowed mode, it exhibits very choppy frame rates... as in that it pauses/becomes unresponsive every second. However, when she maximizes the windowed mode it runs perfectly fine. I have not tried to run it in fullscreen mode and she won't want to anyway because she uses the windowed mode to be able to use AOL. Also, occasionally during the maximized windowed mode and always during the resized window mode, AOL and Firefox CRAWL and have the stuttering, sluggish performance problem. What's weird is that this only happens some of the time when World of Warcraft is in its maximized window mode, so the problem is inconsistent, leaving me scratching my head.So far to rectify what was done, I set all services back to their default settings and undid all of my changes, but the problem still exists. I installed updated Catalyst drivers (as this computer houses an ATI Xpress 1150 integrated graphics card), which she didn't have installed at the time when it was working fine (before I touched the machine). I've Google'd to see if anyone has the same problem and a lot of people report the problem, but most forums end up with posters blaming Vista and whatnot instead of solving the problem. As much as I hate Vista, I'm stuck with having to deal with it because my friend is as stubborn as they come when it comes to her computer. She definitely will be wanting to keep AOL and World of Warcraft under Vista since she hates XP. (Please don't tell me to just reinstall XP or get rid of Vista or whatever, since it's not a solution I can convince her to do. This is a woman that refuses to use Firefox because she's so accustomed to AOL.)Anyone have any clues? I'm stuck.

[truefusion 3]

So this now only happens when you run WoW? Are there any power saving features enabled in Vista? A friend of mine once had enabled the HDD power saving feature in Vista and he noticed a decrease in performance afterwards. But can you go into full detail of all the things you did to Vista? All of the modifications, not the undoing part.

[rayzoredge 2]

I just solved the problem.

 

What happened was after I optimized Windows for performance by going into System > Advanced Settings > Performance (Settings) and then optimizing Windows by adjusting for best performance (as opposed to letting Windows choose and as opposed to optimizing for best appearance), the slowdown problem occurred. What I don't understand is why it happens when Windows is optimized for PERFORMANCE... it's like it has a problem trying to deal with any portion of the desktop when you have a resized window of World of Warcraft up, but if you hide the desktop completely, it works without a hitch. I fixed it by setting it back to adjusting for best appearance. Windows never makes sense to me... One day I'll have to hijack her computer again and see what specific option it is that causes it.

 

For the record, I went through my usual routine and disabled services like Windows Update, Windows Image Acquisition, and a bunch of other services that weren't needed (like support for tablet PCs, cameras and scanners, etc.). I'm used to doing this to my own machines, Vista and XP alike (as I finally tried out Vista Ultimate on my work PC) with no problems, but then again this was rather application-specific. I did look online to check out what the newer services did... I went to this site for my information on the newer services and for which to disable. (Those that I wasn't sure of, I set to Manual.) What I forgot about disabling services is that it doesn't free up a heck of a lot of resources (2% less of a constant RAM load on my work PC)... but then again, it's stuff that I'll never use, you know? Why run it?

 

So in all reality, I can blame Vista even though I didn't want to in the first place. But the real problem in this case is on the user end...

 

P.S.: There were no power management changes.

Edited August 4, 2008 by rayzoredge (see edit history)