11 replies to this topic

[Carnotaurus]

Hey. I guess you can call me computer illiterate(hell, I am, lets be honest.), but heregoes.

My computer has been acting odd for the past few months. It is a Compaq computer I bought from Wal*mart(go ahead and laugh.). Yes, not the best thing for gaming, of course, However its begun to spiral downward for the worst, and I feel helpless. Renegade used to run great on this thing, everything on high settings. It used to be wonderful for all of my needs. Now it seems to be falling into the shitter. Renegade plays quite well for 20-25 mintues before gradually falling in FPS rate to 5 or 4 FPS even with EVERYTHING on LOW settings, no skins or anything that would inhibit lag. When i boot the bloody thing up, I have to shut off RUNDLL from the Windows Control Panel thing(ctrl-alt-delete), or the PC grinds to a halt. Now one of its new and wonderful features is to, once a month, lag like hell no matter what I do. the CPU rate hikes itself upto 100% even if I am moving the slider up or down on the side of my Firefox, MSN, or Notepad window. Can SOMEBODY please help me here? I am currently running a Trend Micro Housecall Virus Scan after Chronojam suggested I do so. Its pulling up a LOT of crap, spyware, adware, ect, but I want to be sure I stop whatever the hell is doing this to my computer. For God's sakes. I just want to play Renegade without lag, and get what I need done, done, on this wretched beast.

[Carnotaurus]

Oh, here is the wonderful greeeting I get every time i boot up this bloody thing.

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[Beowulf]

Run a few spyware sweeps with AdAware SE and Spybot 1.4 and you should be good. If you read the path, it's Wild Tangent causing a problem.

[Carnotaurus]

I did. I uninstalled Wild Tangent a while ago on the damn XP uninstaller and that is when that message started. :S

[Beowulf]

It's still lingering around. You'll probably need to delete the start up entry from the registry but run msconfig first and see if it's a start up process.

[OmegaBolt]

Re. Format. Re. Format. *chants*

[Carnotaurus]

Got a Windows XP CD with Key to send me? this PC never came with a XP disc, and i am obviously not going to Vista, as it does not run old games.

[Beowulf]

Re. Format. Re. Format. *chants*

It doesn't need a format. WT is still sitting around in the registry and the start up process needs to be removed and it will be fixed.

[ambershee]

AOL has a few features that require WildTangent to be installed. That is what's bringing up the error, as you've removed the DLL it wants to run them with. You need to ensure that WildTangent is installed, and that you're not running Anti-Virus or Anti-Spy/Adware programs that will conflict with it.

[Carnivean]

A program trying to run on start up that doesn't exist wouldn't result in the FPS loss now would it?

[Carnotaurus]

Yes, thats the problem. If I do a restart, shut off the RUNDLL(which as I mentioned before, slows the PC down if i leave it on for too long.), and run Renegade, it will run fine for a while, then it will hit the slowdown. it stagnates like the Soviet economy under Brezhnev, at a wonderful, high-quality 4-5 FPS rate. And this is not online, either, so no, its not Ping or Lag.

[ambershee]

AOL however still does exist, and is probably running processes in the background without WildTangent. That's probably your DLL problem, when it tries to execute a process that normally uses that library (such as AOL Instant Messenger).

If AOL isn't triggering it, try running this to remove whatever startup info and registry keys it might have. That'd get rid of the error if WildTangent is otherwise unused;
http://www.macecraft.com/downloads/

(You can do it manually in RegEdit looking for the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and removing the entry WildTangent CDA)


I'd hazard a guess that the slowdown may be a different, perhaps unrelated problem entirely, possibly caused by malware or even hardware issues.

Edited by ambershee, 18 June 2007 - 06:08 AM.