In news:1138130065.421252.49070@g43g2000cwa.googlegro ups.com,
AcidX had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

> Heya.
> Some of you may recognise me. I'm the guy who's PC kept lagging up for
> no reason.
> Well, now I've spotted something else. It still lags up every now and
> then (I'm gonna give it a real good clean on the inside again,
> sometime soon) but it really shouldn't lag so much.
>
> Mainly when playing games. I've noticed it runs a lot slower on my
> 2.54Ghz (992mb ram - supposed to be 1gb, might be something wrong here
> too) than it does on my friends laptop, at: 1.2Ghz, with 700 odd mb
> ram.
> Now, I understand laptop hardware is designed differently, and for
> different purposes... But all the same, mine should at least run at
> the same speed?
>
> I'm pretty sure that... Something on my PC isn't performing correctly,
> or to its full potential.
> I only have 30 processes running at the moment (inclurding firefox and
> MSN) and CPU is at 4%. Reacing about 17 - 11% when I type.
> When I open task manager it rockets to 100%, but goes back down. when
> I do prety much anything it goes high. Even just moving the mouse
> takes it to 20%.
>
> I dunno, maybe it's normal, but I'm pretty sure that something's not
> working right.
> Currently, my commit charge is 267M / 2389M and is roughly the same (a
> bit lower) on startup... I don't know if that's normal either.
>
> Anyway, I'm just looking for a few tips to see how I can make sure my
> comp's working correctly, and how to change it if not.
>
> Thanks.

Consider investing in a AGP (or PCIe if you have that as an option) video
card with an on-board GPU of decent scope. Moving the compute cycles and RAM
off the main compute cycles should help a great deal. Others have suggested
checking temp and memory. Ensure that the memory is the maximum rated - at
1.2 GHz I don't know if you're on the later model PIII or an early P4
adopter. Depending on that you may have a board that can handle something
other than PC133 RAM? That's in the mobo specs and not something I'd know
without more information. If you know the board but not the info you can
easily search for it - I use http://search.msn.com because I like the
results - and that will show what you can handle.

--
Galen - MS MVP - Windows (Shell/User & IE)
http://dts-l.org/
http://kgiii.info/

"We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind,
which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply
there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations." -
Sherlock Holmes