Nagging Game Problem in XP

[Scribe]

Hello.

I have a nagging issue in WindowsXP. When I play Direct3D or OpenGL games, I get momentary pauses during gameplay. This should not happen since my PC specs are high enough to handle gaming without such pauses. I find that these pauses occur when my hard disk is being accessed and I have tried every cache tweak(including cacheman) and I still have the same issue.

Does anyone know of a tweak or fix that can help me resolve this issue?

Thanks
Scribe

My PC Specs are:
AMD Athlon Thunderbird CPU 1333 GHz(133 FSB)
512 Megs PC-133 SDRAM(CAS-2)
GeForce4 Ti-4600 Video Card
SB Live! 5.1 DE Sound CArd
7200 RPM 40-Gig ATA-100 Hard Drive

 

[Fhuising]

Which Driver are you using for your graphics card?
If you're not using the latest detonator driver your new geforce card will probably not work very well.

Fhuising

 

[Scribe]

Thanks for the reply.

I am currently using the new Detonator 28.32 drivers from the nVidia site. I have tried every beta and official driver from version 23.11 to 28.90 and I still have had no improvement.

Could the pauses be caused by the fact that I am using slower PC133 RAM rather than DDR RAM? Would a RAM upgrade make a difference?

Scribe.

 

[RobbieSan]

DDR makes a big diff over 133SD.. I am looking forward to a new XP CPU and DDR.. I have 512MB PC133 and running SiSoft Sandra shows PC133 to have almost half the performance of PC2100 DDR...