for a few days now iv been having this random stutter problem when i play lfs. its as if theres a anti-virus program running or somkething becasue it drops in a decending order from 90 - 0 fps and then it locks up. sometimes after a restart tho it is fine and goes back to 90.

there ae no programs running in the background, the cpu is only at 10% when lfs is on, its isnt overheating, iv run every god damn anti-virus and spyware out there and i have the latest drivers (card is a nvidia GO 6600 (laptop)). any idea what this is?

Something to do with battery voltage throttling? And what PC is it if LFS only uses 10%

nah not battery related, its always running off ac power. the laptop is a toshiba tecra s2, 1.83 centrino, 2 gig ram, nvidia 128meg go6600. there should be no issues and even in a 23 player server it runs at 80fps. starting to get very frustrating. checking the cpu usage again its actually using 30%, alt tabing out releaves the stress it seems.

Thermal Throttling? I have a 2.8GHz CPU and LFS runs at (iirc) about 80% CPU Load. If your CPU gets hot then it's throttled back, and would (eventually) shut itself down to protect it.

I would consider software problems, but I don't now what your running.

yeah im also thinking software or a nasty in the system somewhere which the virus/soyware tests having picked up. its a pretty random occurance, i can play it, it will do that stutter, ill quit the game and go back in straight away and it will be fine. got a feeling ill be the only one with this problem.

What spyware/antivirus software do you use? What applications are running in the background? Does it still do it if you turn off the sound? Does it do it with a different controller?

There are a LOT of options, and we're (I'm) willing to try to help, but you need to narrow it down a bit.

ok, anti virus is AVG, spyware is ad-aware and some panda something aware which picked up more than ad-aware did. i sometimes run msn in the background but the stutter happens when im not running it at times. zone alarm always running and avg idles.

still happens with no sound, and when i half texture and turn all gfx to minimum. thats all i can think of atm.

Well, if your CPU is 1.83 GHz, it is not so much for LFS. But when it runs, OK then.... Are you sure you didn't do anything that can mess up system somehow? Installation of some software, some virus cleanup, driver actualization.... there is a lot of things I can notice... Can you download 3DMark03 and send us a report which it generates?(Click on "Details" in System table, then save results and post it here) It can help us a lot....

I would think along the lines of clownpaint... you can try after you start LFS in the task manager to set LFS's priority level to "high" or "system process" and see if that helps If it doesn't I'd suggest rebooting to safe mode (press F8 at start-up, and select safe mode) then goto www.antivirus.com and run their "house call" service to see if you have got much in the way of addware and greyware your not aware of. If it finds alot of crap I'd say it's time for an upgrade of your security software (firewall, antivirus and antispyware software) My wife's laptop was behaving very sluggish recently and that is what it was

Like tristan says though the more information you give us the more likely we can help... ie versions of software, O/S any changes you have made recently, any other info about how the laptop is behaving...how you connect to the internet (dialup, broadband, via network, etc.) how much free space is left on your hard disk? do you use a swap file? or have you disabled swapfiles with 2G of mem? Is automatic updates enabled and its updating in the background?

HiJackThis or Silentrunners

If you know a little you can get a long way with these 2 tools. they will show you exactly what is running and help you to get rid of them.
Silentrunners is a vb script but safe IMHO

Just google it

Really does sound like thermal throttling tho, there's no standard cpu that could tackle lfs at 10% or 30% load