FFXI lags every second

[saracrow]

Thanks for taking the time to read this, I really appreciate it.

I have FFXI on a notebook, it's a Dell Vostro 1500. Win 7 64byte

Video card is GeForce 8600M GT (256mb).

The notebook ran FFXI rather smoothly until I recently had the ram upgraded from 3gig to 4gig. At this time, when I go to play the game every second (just like a heart beat) the game has a tiny lag spike to it. I don't see my frame rate drop or anything like that, but the spike is very noticeable and annoying. After we upgraded the memory, the bios did pop up a message saying that the memory had changed and prompted me to hit F1 to continue. So I figured the bios did everything and I have not made any changes to it.

I downgraded the memory back to the 3 gig as a precaution.
In case it was a video issue, I deleted my current driver, rebooted, installed again and ran the game. It still does the same thing.

I do not use third party apps, although I did try launching the game with windower to see if that would help.

Any advice the BG tech readers can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[chiyio]

off hand, disable your virus software before you run it and see what that does?

[saracrow]

I use Sunbelt Software's Vipre for my antivirus. I tried running with it disabled but it still does the same thing.

[Sonomaa]

I had this problem once so I know what your talking about, it ended up being a drivers issue. once I uninstalled and reinstalled them it fixed it but another PC I had I had to reload

your mileage may vary but good luck

[saracrow]

thanks for your advice ^^

[chiyio]

to properly reinstall the video driver

1. uninstall old driver
2. boot into safe mood and run this http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/ to get rid of all the parts of the old driver
3. boot normally and install new driver.

[jmc]

Just noticed you have a Nvidia card.

Isn't there a huge framerate issue with Nvidia cards that are 8 series+?

[fishstix]

I have the same laptop and the last time I played, there were no problems. Using something like the old 193.xx drivers or so, the fps wasn't anything to be concerned with. However, reinstalling on my desktop, I had the same issue of the game skipping every few seconds like clockwork. Like they said above, it's most likely a drivers issue. Clean out the old ones with driversweeper and play around with different driver versions. 4gb of ram shouldn't be the problem.

I love this laptop btw, had it for 2-3 years with the only problem being the battery can't hold a charge anymore. It's a bit bulky and heavy, but I like the big screen. It's powerful too, I was able to dual-box pretty well on the laptop.