Guys I really need some help here. I am having a table lag issue that usually hits at around eight tables. I feel like I have tried everything, but I am not quite a computer guru. I play on stars running ninja, hem. I have tried shutting both programs down to see if one was causing this but it still occurs. My computer is a HP compaq dc7600 convertible minitower with 4gb ram, Intel Pentium 4 3.40 GHz processor running Windows 7 64 bit OS. I feared it was the graphics card a while back so installed an Nvidia 9800 GT card. Still I am having the same lag. Any help here would be greatly appreciated. Also, I don't know if this matters but I am running dual monitors as well.

So your computer lags as soon you open the 8th table on stars, without any other programs than stars running?

It is as they are loading up. I usually do have some sort of music playing as well either lastfm or pandora. Other than that no other programs running. I forgot to mention that in the post but I have also tried without running music......still lags. I reinstalled Stars and for one session it was fine a few weeks ago but when I returned last night it occurred again. I even reformatted last night and it is a little better but still lags some.

Go to start - run, type "cmd" and enter "chkdsk c: /r"

You will be prompted to restart. The whole process might take a while.

Additionally, I would go trough the malware sticky and pray for nibnedal to show up and also run Prime95 in "blend" for a couple of hours.

So I did what you said. I also used the built in Windows utility to rate my computer and the results are terrible. Shouldn't my processor rate better than 1.8 on a 7.9 scale? Also, my RAM is only scoring a 2.4. I am completely baffled at this point.

chkdsk went trough with or without repairing?

Did you run prime already?

Don't even bother caring about the windows performance index.
I got 7,9 for CPU, 8,2 for RAM, 7.9 for data transfer rate and an overall rate of 1.0 because I use a professional 2D GPU.

I didn't see a repair prompt. I just restarted once complete. As far as the prime thing goes, I am confused on what exactly I am doing. It is installed but I am unsure on how to run it.

Prime has 2 different buttons you can click iirc. One of them is OK the other one is CANCEL. You'll figure which is the right one.

Just use blend as method for now.

I think this is the problem. HP sucks really badly and especially the compaq ones, in general.
I've had so many experiences with these as a user and a salesman to know that I will never buy one again. Neither Fujitsu Siemens which I'm using now and it's lagging like hell sometimes.

Have you scanned for viruses? Dload ad-aware and run the scan. Do you use wlan or cable? I change sometimes between the cable and wlan and it stops lagging. Many times all the internet activity makes your computer slow.

I am in the Navy and gone a good bit but before I left this last time I had tried everything. Just before I left I uninstalled and reinstalled Stars and it ran awesome. I got back last night and it lagged again so I just skipped everything and reformatted. Just now I loaded a set without HEM and it is golden. It sounds crazy I know, but that's what fixed it this time. Still though I need to be able to run HEM while playing.

HEM is also jamming my computer. Should buy the real version. Would work better for sure.

I appreciate all the help from you guys. Apparently I somehow made a mistake during my install of Windows last night which made my problem worse instead of better. I once again reformatted and my computer seems to be working a lot smoother now. I moved my database to my data drive and completely started over. No time to load games tonight but hopefully it will go better tomorrow. Thanks again.

Your computer is getting old, tbh. Your processor is ~5-6 years old and the technology it was built on is 10 years old. Your ram technology isn't quite as bad (PC2 5300?), and you likely have a slow 5400RPM harddrive.

On top of all that you have a substandard motherboard (and probably chipset, possibly an intel chipset if you're lucky) from a name brand manufacturer.

I would probably get a single high-speed harddrive (raptor or SSD) and install WinXP, disabling unnecessary services. You don't need to deal with the overhead Win7 is taking from your system. XP is pretty lean, by comparison. You're fine with XP 32-bit, imo.

Others may disagree with me

I disagree. Win7 should run fine. You can try disabling the aero theme. that might be hanging it up.

Not at all, I just think I would get a new computer to go with the new SSD.

While Win 7 might run okay, XP would almost certainly run more smoothly on this old and modest system.

Yeah, Win7 is definitely too much for your Pentium 4. It's time for a new PC. And if your DB is less than 500K hands then there is no need for an SSD, they are still expensive.

I deploy in January so will put off the new pc til I return. Last night I took one monitor away and now am 20 tabling no problem. I am guessing two monitors is too much for this system? Again, I appreciate all the help here.

I just wanted to pick up on this in case anyone's reading the thread in future. AdAware is not a good way to detect viruses, or keep them off your machine. It looks for, well, adware: things like tracking cookies. The sticky threads in this forum have much better suggestions as to what to do, but you should be running one (and one only) good antivirus program (I use Avira, which is free and very good) and then other antimalware checks if you like (I rely most on Malwarebytes Antimalware - you'll see references to MBAM - which is also free).

Alright guys I took the advice and bought a new pc. I wasn't aware just how far behind the times I was but appreciate the honesty.

Not even close, strangely.

The system requirements the win7 kernel has are way lower than XP and especially Vista.
With Aero disabled, win7 runs on win98 machines that were too weak to handle XP.

Someone was even able to install win7 on an old 486 with a only a couple of mb RAM. It took like 27 hours to install and needs 30 minutes or something to boot, can't find that test aorn.
They weren't able to even install winME on it and they also made a hobby on installing funky linux kernels on some kitchen appliances. If that's interesting PM me and I will try to find it.

As win7 came out, I had an already pretty outdated, old laptop I only used to log some things and it was way below the official system requirements. I think it had 256mb RAM and and a very weak centrino mobile and after the install took forever, the performance increase with win7 and every effect etc. disabled was tremendous. My jaw dropped.