At all costs, I must play Guild Wars! I require your Aid!

Warriors, Elementalists, Monks, Mesmers (especially lady mesmers), Rangers, and ... and... okay fine... and necromancers, too...

I call upon your aid!

As the Charr regroup their armies, and the Stone Summit's hate grows, and the Undead arise in greater numbers, I have grown weak.

My friends, my computer, my great fort in which I defend Tyria and the lands of Guild Wars, is weaker than ever...

OK FINE I'll get to my point... look at this, and cry for those whose time has come... (I dunno...)

-NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420
-Dell DIMENSION 8250
-Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.53 GHz
-2.52 GHz
-256 MB of RAM

I cannot buy anything. I don't care if the graphics look really really bad, I just want to be able to play without constant slowness! The game is sooo slow. Please, tell me what to do! I will do anything to speed up my game, ANYTHING!!! (saying anything means I am desperate and does not necessarily mean i will do anything, thank you)


EDIT: I HAVE DSL

defrag

remove all spyware

close all unneeded processes running in background.

choose best performance over best quality in graphics choices.

go to 800x600 x 16 milliom colors (or less if it will let you)

BTW that 420mx has standard pc memory instead of graphics memory.

nvidia got blasted for that card

Thank you, O ALMIGHTY GOD OF COMPUTER KNOWLEDGE

but um, i still some more gods to worship, so um, NEED MORE GODS! HELP ME DEVINE ONES!

I recently changed the mobo and I had 2 sticks of 512 ram for a total of 1gig ram.
The new mobo did not like one of the sticks so I'm running 512 and the game takes forever to load things.
Buy at least more ram.
If u can afford to make your ram 1 gig then go for it.

that is the fun part.

he said he could not get ANYTHING.

we have to help with what he is stuck with

Your computer isn't really that bad ... as long as you run on slow settings it should be kewl ...

What is your connection type ... wifi ... dsl ... cable ... dail-up

I think the problem might lie in that my friend

I play guild wars on my laptop BTW ... the only problems I every get is the dreaded error=7, when im using wifi, and other than that its all good ... I just plug right into my router. My laptop has worse specs than your comp too, except I have 512 ram, but 256 is probably cool
yah the video card sucks but it should still work most of the time ... I used to play on intergrated and it was kewl

Service pack 2 will only help it alittle ... im assuming u want a big change

And can u explain what u mean by slowness : lag or always slow game play

Here some windows xp (and service pack 2) tweaks to give you a small boost.

Disable Indexing Services - http://www.tweakxp.com/article37006.aspx

And Disable DEP
http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofivers...p/t307102.html

Unfortunately I have to be the evil god of bad news. The slowness has nothing to do with your actual computer. The ram would help in speedyness but 512 is better. However, the slowness is probably due to your "wonderful" video card. Go searching on newegg.com or have a garage sale. You need a new card.

EDITED on top: I have DSL

OH DEAR GODS OF COMPUTER KNOWLEDGE.... I am screwed.

well, if you can stand the jolly jokes taken out on you by people...and have oyur own copy of ye olde windows 98, it might help give you a boost in the fact it wont swallow memory like a starved wolf at a cow factory...

(yes, i know it out of date, yes i know it old, but it works fine on older machines and since he has only got 256, and win xp would swallow half of that, sometimes its usefull to go back rather than forward....he did say..anything...to play faster....)

i still use win 98 se for my online machine, have bb cable and 512 meg mem...i dont lag too much, so it might be worth it if or when his machine coughs up a fit and needs wipeing...after all, whats one day of wipe, install 98, install drivers, update guildwars and try it out ^^

I don't see why you'd be having any problems with that setup unless you have the graphics settings set high. Or maybe that vidcard is a problem...I can't recall whether that's a good card or not.

Anyway, I'm running just fine on:

1GHz Celeron
768MB RAM
GeForce4 Ti4200
DSL

Try setting the game detail to the lowest setting and turn off all anti-aliasing. Then see if it's playable. And uninstall/kill any unnecessary processes that would be taking up bandwidth and/or memory. If you could afford anything (I know you said you can't), I'd look at getting more RAM.

EDIT: What Omega said.

It's probably the RAM problem, because he doesn't have enough to run enough processes.

Even at low settings, at 256, you're gonna find it very difficult to play smoothly. I think upping it a notch to 512 won't hurt that much. Another 256 stick is just 20 bucks anyway. Getting a 512 would be even better and theyre fairly cheap, around 50~.

For me, I run GW on:

2.4GHz P4 Processor
1 Gig Ram
ATI Radeon AIW 9600XT

On high settings, it's a good combination but if you want to play smoothly, try aiming for your ram. That's most likely your problem.

I have to agree, this should give you back at least a little speed. Instructions on how to do all this, assuming you have WinXP service pack 2:

1. Defragment.
Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Defragmenter. Click your hard drive, (usually C Analyze it, the tell it to defragment. This process is extremely long. I'm doing a test defragment right now, just to see exactly how it works, and after 10 minutes I'm at 5%. Once it's done, your hard drives will be squeaky-clean and logically organized.

2. Kill the Spyware!
Ad-Aware: http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-SE-...bj=dl&tag=top5
Spybot Search and Destroy: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/mirrors/index.html
Run both of those, and that should kill most, if not all spyware/trojans/etc. on your system. I say both because no two virus scanners scan in the same way, and what one doesn't catch another probably will.

3. Video Settings.
Rather obvious. GW's in-game menu should override any settings set by your desktop while playing, so whatever you want your desktop set to is fine the way it is. Low resolution, no antialiasing, best performance, etc.

Unfortunately, if you have no money for upgrades, you'll be stuck like this until you do, barely scraping enough power out of your computer to run GW. As soon as possible, upgrade that videocard! Stick with nVidia, but even just an FX5500 would help a lot, and they're only about 50$. Another 256 of ram couldn't hurt either.

New Graphics Card
and
More Ram, 512mb-1gig

=( guess i better start saving up...

Weird, I had an GeForce MX 2, 256mb of ram, and a P4 1.7ghz CPU and it ran on max settings fine.

What are the system requirements for Guild Wars?

Minimum System Specs:
Windows XP/2000/ME/98
Intel Pentium III 800 Mhz or equivalent
256 MB RAM
CD-ROM Drive
2 GB Available HDD Space
ATI Radeon 8500 or GeForce 3 or 4 MX Series Video Card with 32MB of VRAM
16-bit Sound Card
Internet connection
Keyboard and mouse

Recommended System Specs:
Windows XP/2000/ME/98
Intel Pentium III 1GHz or equivalent
512 MB RAM
CD-ROM Drive
2 GB Available HDD Space
ATI Radeon 9000 or GeForce 4 Ti Series Video Card with 64MB of VRAM
16-bit Sound Card
Internet connection
Keyboard and mouse

From the system req's it sounds like you just need more RAM but I would also try to optimise your connection, as mentioned above, by following the spyware cleanup advice and anything esle that may possibly using your connection as you play. My $0.02 however, is that I would also make sure that you have the current driver for your card as it should be working fine considering that it meets the recommended req's.

Would... um... "updating" the driver help ANY? I have no clue how...

RAM first then video card! The video card you have can do GW, but your system has barely enough RAM to run Windows XP...nevermind GW, too.

Assuming you are running Win XP follow this link download and install. This link is to the current driver for you specific card from nvidia and may help along with a system cleanup. Worth a shot anyway until you can purchase some RAM.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_81.98.html