Click to See Complete Forum and Search --> : Computer can't handle design work or gaming anymore


drnic010
07-10-2009, 03:27 PM
Hey guys,

I know this problem isn't really web related, well, it is kind of...

Basically, I bought and built a computer at the beginning of this year with the intention of it being used for video editing, photoshopping and a bit of gaming. Seeing as video and image editing can be quite resource intensive I thought to myself "Hey, I'll buy myself a something reasonably powerful." So I put it together around late December and was pretty happy...for a while. Over the course of time I've gone from thinking it's a pretty decent machine to thinking it's a pile of junk and wanting to throw it out my bedroom window...

So anyway, it doesn't handle video editing particularly brilliantly - I was using a copy of Adobe Elements 2 recently (pretty old I know) and it really struggled. For instance, when I tried to open the DVD menu maker it almost crashed (the Vista loading icon appeared, but it took like 5 minutes to start animating!!). And just today I was trying to play Oblivion and it kept crashing when I was going through areas with high amounts of grass (I had the grass distance setting on quite low as I knew that made it lag, but I had to lower it further and it STILL crashed...). It used to lag, but it never crashed before until today.

Anyway, here are my specs:
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz
- Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H
- 4GB (2x2GB) RAM
- 3D nVidia GeForce 9500GT
- Patriot 64BG Warp" Solid State Drive (for system and software)
- 1Tb Maxtor DiamondMax 11 HDD (for images, music, docs, ect)

Basically, my own thoughts are that I need a more powerful graphics card (I have a sidebar app that tracks my RAM and Core usage and they seem to handle everything pretty well), however, I've checked the requirements for Oblivion and they recommend an Nvidia GeForce 6800 which is much older so I'm not sure about that. Anyway, what do you guys think/suggest?

criterion9
07-10-2009, 03:42 PM
I would use ccleaner. (ccleaner.com) It sounds like you might have some regular maintenance and registry hive cleaning to do. After you run the registry cleaner and make sure you have at least 20% free space on your main drive see how that works for you.