Game freezes for 4-5 seconds once every 30 seconds or so. What's confusing me is I'm in PoF with my wife (it's her PC that freezes) and I'll be 2 boxing. With mercs we're a full group. Her computer will have these mini-hangups regardless of what we're doing. She could be running across PoK or we could be in the middle of killing. She does have everything on full and with damage caster mercs there are plenty of spell effects around but her computer doesn't seem to have issues with that. Any ideas?
Also seems to take awhile for her to zone, think her record in the last 24 hours is a 7 minute zone time. Taking me back to '99
Hard to say.. but do you have /log on? If so, delete the old log file because the file might be too large. Also turn off the journal (alt j). Also check if the harddrive has still some free space left. It could be also a driver issue. Check if you have the latest available drivers for sound and graphic card installed.
You can also try exempting the Everquest folder and eqgame.exe from being actively scanned by your antivirus software. I know that active AV scans can slow even good gaming rigs to a crawl. A bit more details on tbe specs of the box might shed aditional light on the issue.
This sounds like a memory issue. How much ram in the pc? If you have plenty of ram, might want to check page swap or whatever it is called these days.
The computer has a fresh install of windows 7. There is 140gb of free space left on the harddrive. Tried to disable FW and AV but that didn't seem to make a difference. Computer has 4 gig of ddr 2 ram, I know that isn't a lot by today's standard but I would have thought that could run EQ.
EQ is hard coded to use no more than 2GB so 4GB or 40, it wouldn't matter for one instance. It still sounds to me like an AV program scanning the log file on the fly slowing you down. Exempt it like I noted above. Also, for S&Gs, set your cpu affinity in your .ini file to -1. Edit: just noticed that you mentioned that you already did both exclusions in your AV program. Does anything else run on her box while running EQ? How long does the box go between reboots? Does she do a lot of web browsing on it?
Nothing else is running, EQ is the only game she plays (hence why the PC isn't the slickest). She doesn't really do anything on the PC other than play EQ to be fair. Tested her HDD last night with HDD Regenerator and that came back with 0 bad sectors. Think I'm fresh out of ideas, maybe I'll memtest her ram.
On Resource Monitor CPU is 30% but has a max freq of 70% when running EQ. CPU is only an AMD Athlon 7550 dualcore 2.5ghz. Could this be my issue? Double checked and EQ is definitely set to only 1 core.
1. Set Antivirus (windows or 3rd party to exclude EQ directory 2. Set Firewall to allow eqgame.exe full access 3. Alt J, disable Journal - For new accounts (not toons) this feature is now off by default. This is a per-toon setting. 4. Power Options - Always On (XP) or High Performance - Also if Nvidia GPU, in it Power Mgt Mode - Best performance 5. Set EQ to use more than one core - Go to your EQ folder, open eqclient.ini w/notepad and change CPUAffinity0/1 to look like following. CPUAffinity0= -1 CPUAffinity1= -1 6. Open up case and clear out all dust buildup w/can compressed air, especially on heatsinks and that all fans are actually running. 7. A program is running in the background that is hogging system resources - It can be a windows program such as Windows Media Player Sharing Service or a 3rd party program that may have been installed with drivers, be it Nvidia or AMD.
What's the RPM speed of your HDD? I had a similar issue on my system, Core i7, 24gb ram and Nvidia 770 with 4gb on board ram. I installed EQ on to a slow 1TB 5400 rpm drive and the game would freeze every few seconds. I moved the game to the SDD and now I have no issues, I can even run 4 sessions at once with out freezing.
/loginterval #, by default, I think it sets to write to the log file for the character every 4 seconds? If you have multiple characters loaded and logging is on, well you can imagine all those small writes to multiple log files on a HDD versus the SSD. Additionally, a virus/malware scanning type of software could be scanning that log file on every single write to compound the issue. I use /loginterval 0 command and am always logging. Sarkaukar already covered the most important stuff. You can go to SOE's support site and do searches for your firewall software / router firewall, port settings and other details. As an example, one setting in ZoneAlarm's firewall software determines whether you zone in 7 seconds or several minutes.
