Alrighty. I've been having a great time with LFS for a year now. For the first few months, everything was great. I was able to go multiplayer and never had an issue with glitching or frame rate.

Lately (since last April or so) I have had issues with multiple cars. In single player mode, 3 or four cars is usually no problem. In multiplayer, even having one car in the area can cause frame rates to dip under 20. Race starts area joke and usually involve me trying like mad to get to the shoulder of the road before I get run over (in this case, my fps is in the low single digits at best).

Here's what I know about my system:
It's a Dell Inspiron 8500 circa 2003

OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 2 Build 2600
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name MIKE
System Manufacturer Dell Computer Corporation
System Model Inspiron 8500
System Type X86-based PC
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 2 Stepping 7 GenuineIntel ~1196 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date Dell Computer Corporation A08, 6/30/2005
SMBIOS Version 2.3
Windows Directory C:\WINDOWS
System Directory C:\WINDOWS\system32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume2
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.1.2600.2180 (xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)"
User Name MIKE\Michael
Time Zone Eastern Standard Time
Total Physical Memory 512.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 275.95 MB
Total Virtual Memory 2.00 GB
Available Virtual Memory 1.96 GB
Page File Space 1.22 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys

One cue that I can see is that every few months, the computer will stumble across a damaged portion of hard drive. Sometimes I will get a message saying that such-and-such hard drive location is bad. Other times, the computer will fail outright. This requires me to boot from the CD-rom, and run through diagnostics. Hopefully this won't happen again, since the disk broke last time I went throught the process (don't ask, I was stupid).

In short, I have done all kinds of things to try to remidy the issue. Re-installation of LFS. Removing EVEEERYTHING and starting over by reinstalling Windows (can no longer do because of my two-piece CD).

So, any suggestions? Keep in mind that I'm a cheap bastard. This game helped me get in the racing mindset this summer before I took my car up to Watkins Glen for the first time. It has helped me create a rythm, and stay smooth. Anyway, thanks for reading about me heartaches.

Mike

Your best shot is to get a new copy of XP and get a new hard disk, Windows XP isn't very smart when it comes to damaged sectors on a disk. my windows 98 computer used to block damaged sectors and then write around them, XP doesn't seem to do this well.

If your hard drive is damaged, there's realy nothing you can do to fix it.

Thank for the reply. I guess I'll be picking up a new HD and OS. I have an 80 Gig USB hard drive that I can use to transfer the crap off of my old HD. Is there a good reason to get a copy of XP pro, or can I step down to home edition. All I really do is LFS, surf, office applications, automotive tuning.

I could probably be sweet talked into a bit more memory as well. Maybe a bump from 512 to 1024. That way I can LFS and Napster at the same time with a good safety net.

Alright. Here it goes. I just got back from Best Buy with a nice little goody bag. One Western Digital 120GB hard drive. Two 512MB memory cards. One copy of Microsoft Windows Vista, home premium edition.

Well, see you guys on the other side.

I'm not too sure about the changes. The hard drive swap and Windows install went smooth as silk. I'm still trying to clear out all the Vista "features" and get this thing to look like the Win 95 that I'm used to. As long as I can get there I think Vista will be fine.

As far as LFS performance, I'm getting upwards of 90 FPS running solo. One issue is that every few minutes, it will dip into single digits for a few seconds. Just enough time to run a few cars off the track. In multiplayer, starting a race is useless. Frame rate is usually between 30-50 running alone and about 20 with a car or two around.

If anyone knows any tips or tricks to get LFS, Windows, or the computer as a whole to run quicker, I'd really appreciate it. How does my Mobility Radeon 9000 graphics card match up against the current gaming laptop cards? I'm thinking that may be a bottleneck, but I seem to recall that it was pretty top notch back in the day.

I'll have to figure something out with the memory I bought. I must have picked up the wrong kind. Whatever. I'll try again next time.

Thanks again Dragon Commando!

Your CPU is really borderline as well. More RAM wouldn't hurt, but I ran with 512 for quite a while with satisfactory results.

To free up as many resources as possible, switch off any background processes including screen savers, anti-virus software, music software, web browsers etc, and any program that automatically updates.
Every little bit helps when you are scratching for performance.

In your video card properties try disabling vertical sync and see if it has a positive impact on your FPS rate.

In LFS, race with wind turned off if possible (prevents trees and flags from being animated) and any visuals that you can live without.

you buy vista and want to change it to look like windows 95?

Quote from mattlikespeoples :

you buy vista and want to change it to look like windows 95?

Well not everyone wants to waste resources just for a nice looking OS

I would have bought XP. Or aquired it at least.

Vista has been proven IIRC to run games noticably slower, and is a resource hog.

Quote from DaveWS :

I would have bought XP. Or aquired it at least.

Vista has been proven IIRC to run games noticably slower, and is a resource hog.

FYI, every new windows release is a resource hog. My first PC ran just fine with Windows on 8 Mb RAM.