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If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
My computer lags intermittently when I play Team Fortress 2
I don't know what's causing it, though I do know that the fan goes nuts.
If it's going to lag like that, why wouldn't it lag constantly?
Ehh, whatever. I'll just idle.
Comments
Task Manager, man. Track down that gluttonous process and google the shit out of it. It's almost always something you can just delete altogether.
A while back I had my CPU being eaten so badly I couldn't even play EDGE. The offender? HP Quick Launch Buttons, which I have never ever used, but apparently runs some kind of constant listener that occasionally freaks out and spinlocks or something.
What should I be looking for? Because killing stuff that takes lots of RAM doesn't seem to help; I already make sure not to run any browser (or even Skype or e-mail clients) and it still does that.
Take a good look at some of the bloatware on your computer — if you haven't already removed as much as possible, which I highly recommend.
RAM isn't necessarily an indicator unless it's a blatant memory leak (which only translates into a slower system because those piled-up objects are usually bloating a for-each loop somewhere). Sort the process list by CPU % -- usually the offender will be hogging 40% or more of the CPU. Look up the .exe name of the process, then google it. If it's something you can live without, don't settle for just ending the task, but go to control panel and uninstall it altogether or it'll just pop up again the next time you boot.
Ask Toolbar is one of the usual ones, since it tries to update constantly regardless of whether you're using a browser or even connected to the internet -- that thing is borderline malware and should be uninstalled from control panel immediately. AVG Toolbar is another one (look for vprot.exe, and if you've used AVG for long, check Windows/Temp/toolbar_log.txt as well, since there was a long-running bug that would bloat that log file to 40+ gigabytes). Like I said earlier, I found one from HP Quick Launch buttons of all things, which is supposed to just be a basic hotkey list for presentations and somehow managed to hog a CPU core for long periods of time despite never having been used since I bought the computer.
Don't be surprised if it winds up being a browser toolbar. All of the more problematic ones (like Ask and AVG) run even when no browser is active.
Also, hit start and type msconfig into the run bar. Go to the Startup tab and uncheck anything superfluous. The Startup folder will pre-load anything in it when you first boot the system for quicker use, but a lot of factory settings keep shitloads of Adobe crap and various other garbage there, which hogs resources constantly instead of just when you're using them.