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[Moonchild]

I read the previous post by hollon so I thought I'd share my little problem...I owned a copy of Driv3r but I somehow lost it so recently I purchased another. The problem is this, whenever I play the game it slows down to (literally) 1 frame per second. I tried turning all the options in the menu to low but again nothing helped. Interestingly, when i drove on the beach with no other cars the game never even had a hicup and I was on the highest setting but as soon as I drive on normal road the game slows down like crazy.

I don't have a very good computer and I'll provide the specs...

[madness]

After talking a look at your PC's specs, they in fact look pretty good. There better than what I used to have and driv3r used to work fine after some fine tuning.

So I'll go through a bunch of suggestions...

Suggestion 1:
Make sure you have the latest driver patch installed. You can download the latest patch by Clicking Here

[Now try driv3r and see how it works]

Suggestion 2:

Delete the temporary files from your computer:
Click Start > Run > type %temp% > OK > click Edit > Select All > Delete.

[Now try driv3r and see how it works]

Suggestion 3:

Close down background applications:
**Disconnect internet**, Click Start > Run > type msconfig > Click the Startup tab > Click Disable All button > Apply > OK, and restart your computer.

[Now try driv3r and see how it works]

Suggestion 4:
Make sure all your drivers are upto date. If not and your not sure how to update them, don't worry all that much as it isn't as important since driv3r is an older release game.

[Now try driv3r and see how it works]

Suggestion 5: [note: Suggestion three may already do this, so only try this if suggestion three didn't work]
Press "Ctrl+Alt+Del" look down the bottom of the window which just popped up and there will be two things which are shown one is the processes and the other is the cpu usage. At the moment in doing this your computer should be mostly idle.

So at the moment how many processes does it read and what's your cpu usage at the moment. If cpu usage is over 10% and you have over 40 processes open this can really screw up games sometime particularly driv3r so I suggest you go to the processes tab and close down as many process you can by selecting a process and by using the "end process" button for almost all of the processes until you get somewhere around 20to25 processes.

Note: some processes will stop you from closing them so just leave them open as there required to keep windows running also closing some of these cause windows to shutdown, if you accidentally close one of these just remember what you pressed and don't press it next time to avoid that from happening again.

If you close down the explorer.exe process, which is basically windows icons, navigation and things like that you can open it by going file new task and by typing in "explorer". However I suggest that you try opening up driv3r this way with all the process you can close - closed.

[Now try driv3r and see how it works]

Suggestion 6:
If you were unsuccessful that means you probably didn't have to many other processors running in the background on your pc. So now it's time to try doing a few other things that'll improve the performance of your pc.

Step 1: Defraging your HDD
Go to "My Computer"
right click on your HDD and go to properties
tools tab, then "defragment now" button
then press the defragment button

this will take some time has it takes all the files on your hard drive and puts them in reading order.

[Now try driv3r and see how it works]

If driv3r still doesn't work I'll continue my list off things to try... I just think that some of these may fix your problem and there is no point continuing just in case you get it working.

If not I may make a proper guide that everyone can follow... instead of doing this for ever single person.

Regards,
Driver Madness

[Moonchild]

Thanks for all the suggestions, I'll try them tomorrow. Something kinda weird to add...When I play the driving game "Gate Race" particually the one in Nice with the convertible, the game runs smooth with all the settings maxed (and there's traffic onscreen) but everywhere else it slows down to the point where the game timer on screen moves just a few millaseconds every real 1-3 seconds.

But anyways, I'll try the suggestions to see if it helps, and again, thanks.

[madness]

wow, that's weird.
I've never played the game on a dual core pc and maybe the game has a few problems running on such a system so the first thing I'd try is the patch. After all it is suggestion 1. I'm not 100 percent certain, but maybe it's a coding problem with the game and your pc is too good for it!

Once again I've never tried this game on a dual-core and maybe this is causing it. Note: this isn't the only time I've noticed something like this, you get a super pc and then you put in an old game some cases it won't work at all and some the game runs pretty strange.

Apparently you put Driver: Parallel Lines in a super console like the ps3 and some crazy thing happen in game.

anyways when you have time try some of the steps I've provided and if none of them help just say and we can look a little deaper.

But if that mission in nice works fine I'm not sure what the problem is and most likely it's some sort of compatibility problem, most likely there is something in your pc which isn't 100% compatible with the game.

[Moonchild]

Well, ok....I tried the steps. I had the patch already installed (got it from gamespot) so that wasn't needed. I pretty much had no temporary files so step 2 didn't help either.

I closed down the backround applications and the game was still bouncing frame rates like crazy. One moment it's good then bam it drops severely...(basically if any traffic appears and I had low settings)

My drivers are up to date and like you said, this is an older game so this step is not really neccesary.

I had done step 6 just before I installed the game but I did it again anyways and it changed nothing.

Step 5 is the only step that I didn't completely try, I had like 41 or something processes running and the CPU usage was fluctuating between 1-6% I closed some but again, it didn't change anything.

I think that your right that it's a possible coding or compatibility problem because why would certain parts of the game work fine (some driving games) while all others slow down like hell. And I remeber once like 3 weeks ago, I tried the game and every thing was working fine (I even did some Undercover missions) but then the next day it would go back to the way it was before....Basically, I think I'm screwed.