Guild Wars lag on Windows 7

Beforehand, I would like to mention that I did use the search function to try and figure out the issue I'm having. However, it would simply take so long for me to find that one specific thread where someone might or might not have the same issue as I'm having, whereas I could just make a new thread about it, and someone will reply: "Lazy **** Use search, this is the thread for this issue: "Insert Link""

So sorry beforehand in case there's already a solution on guru.

Now on to the issue:

I usually play Guild Wars at my home on my computer running Windows XP. It runs fine there, and I have some clue what the settings should be. However, I'm at my gf's house now, using her PC which has Windows 7 installed, and Guild Wars gets stuck at around a constant 5 fps.

Not knowing the exact inner workings of Windows 7 (But having a basic knowledge of Vista and extensive of XP), I've tried a couple of things. Firstly, I've defragmentated the hard drive to make sure GW.dat is easily accesable. Then I've checked all the virusscanners and security tools to give full authority to Guild Wars. (Though I think they would affect ping rather than fps) Lastly, I've allocated a high priority to Guild Wars.exe in the task manager menu, all with no results.

The computer's specs are way beyond mine at home, and should be able to play GW smooth at highest settings.

PC's specs:

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core 4600+ 2.4 GHz
Ram: 3 GB
Graphics Card: NVIDIA Geforce 7300 LE
OS: Windows 7
Hard Drive: 298 GB of which 148 free.

Added the "Test My Computer" log as an attachment. Due to the limitation in side, I splitted it up in 2 files, and removed the intire IP and internet section, as I know this is not internet related. (My ping is fine -<150ms)

I hope someone can put me in the right direction. My best gues is that Windows doesn't allow Guild Wars enough RAM/Video card resources. Sadly, I have no idea where to adjust it.

Graphics Card: NVIDIA Geforce 7300 LE <-

There's your problem, that's an extremely low end graphics card.

Yup, you shouldn't have ever though about upgrading to Win7 with that graphics card.

Your nvidia drivers are a little old, but I doubt thats the issue. Have you tried using the Win7 basic theme to disable Aero/other windows effects? (http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...windows-vista/)

Although everyone else have already said it, it's the video card it's no good for playing games on.

Ah, I dind't know the grpahics card was so bad, I thought it was better than mine. Well, Since it's hardware related, not much I can do about I gues.

Thanks for the replies

Well I'd agree that your video card is probably whats causing you to get 5 FPS. Though I played guild wars on a 6150LE Integrated chip with *medium* settings for over a year and usually got 15-20 fps, but then again you are on windows 7 and I was on xp. You could always dig into your Nvidia settings and see if the card is forcing Anti aliasing or maybe has sliders set to quality instead of performance or something like that because that will bring your card to it's knees for sure. Pretty sure you probably checked that already though but Good luck with it!

5 fps is to low even if it is a bad video card
i ran windows 7 with geforce 6200 TC on low settings and i still could get above 30 fps
doubt it that 7300 is worse than 6200 series

I would agree - the 7300LE is a very low end card and would generally suck for gaming. The fps in this case, seems very low, but it also depends upon the resolution of your monitor and the graphics settings within GW.
If your GF's monitor is relative large with say 1680x1050 or 1920x1080 (HDTV) or higher rez, the 7300LE would really need to struggle no matter what you do.
In any case, you could try reducing the graphics settings in GW to get better fps. One easy thing to do is to go into the graphics settings in GW and select "Auto Detect" and set AA to "off" (if Auto Detect doesn't change it). It won't look pretty, but it might run a bit better fps-wise.
You could always buy her a better video card.

i used to play gw with
WIN7
Pen4 2.6 478 socet
ddr1~768 mb
and nvidia 6800 256mb (agp)
and that was OK... i had no lags at all

I disagree with this for one reason: auto-detect, in my personal experience, is not very effective.

Why? Well... When I ran some tests with it (on a low end laptop and on my main PC [which can run up to 10 GW at a time with minimal performance issues]) the auto detect feature always puts the laptop at mid specs and always puts my high-end pc at minimal specs. <--wtf?


Having said that, don't do auto-detect. Simple set all of the options to their bare minimum, make sure to untick the 4 boxes and turn AA (anti-aliasing) off.

The 6800 while older, is a high end GPU, while the 7300 is low end. The difference between the performance of the two cards will always favor the 6800 even if it's older.

When you enter a game/full screen app Aero is automatically disabled on both Vista and 7.

like stated above disable AA in both the Nvidia Control Panel & in Guild Wars, try playing at a lower resolution too, like 1280x1024 or lower. I would think that you should get at least 20-25 FPS on medium settings that way.

Or a $40 video card purchase that would allow you to max GW out and get good FPS too.

If a 7300LE is way beyond what you have at home then what the hell are you running GW on, a commodore 64?

That's like saying "don't eat pizza" because I ate it once and it made me sick.

Your results are definitely wtf worthy, but the usual complaint about Auto-detect is that it tends to err on the low side - that is, it tends to set things to a lower level than absolutely necessary. In my experience, it works reasonably well.

Not quite true(atleast not quite true with 7, can't remember about vista). Many games don't affect aero at all. You can easily tell which ones do turn it off and which don't by how you will see a very brief period of aero basic after alt-tabbing/exiting on the ones that do, as well as a very brief flash to disable it upon starting/alt-tabbing back to the game(even on a fast machine). Also, guild wars is one that doesn't change aero.