Fixed the Hitch in My Giddyup
Posted on August 20, 2008
2 Comments
Earlier today I decided it was time to re-subscribe to my old weakness, EverQuest, once again. I have upgraded my system since my last time around and was pretty excited to see how this new rig would fair against the stress that EQ can bring to bear.
Here’s the current Vista Experience thingy (click for full size):
It has gone up a bit since the first time I ran it due to a recent upgrade to the GeForce 8600GS that a co-worker gifted me. That little upgrade raised the graphics score from a 4.3 to 4.9 and Gaming Graphics from a 4.8 to a 5.3.
It didn’t take long to patch and then I eagerly logged into experience EQ with the best PC I’ve had in the (omg) eight years that I’ve been playing.
Boy was I disappointed.
I had this horrible “lurch” or pause about every 5 seconds. Also, about every other mouse-click was ignored. I was seriously about ready to format and switch to XP but I decided to be a bit more methodical first…
After each change, I’d start up EQ and test.
- Current video drivers? Check.
- Turn off Aero. No diff.
- Configure Antivirus to not do real-time scanning on the EQ directories. No change
- Turn off Windows Sidebar. Nope.
I already had browsers and such shut down, but then I happened to glance at the tray and noticed my old/new pal Digsby running. “Oh ho!” thinks I as I kill Digsby and restart EQ.
Yup. That was it. Now she runs like buttah.
I’m not sure what the issue is as Digsby doesn’t seem to burn excess CPU cycles. But there’s definitely a conflict of some sort. Easily fixed though – I just need to remember to exit it before playing. Oh, and I must be fair and point out that my Digsby version is a beta.
As for Everquest? Boy, I dunno… I got pretty gung-ho into it this past Spring and spent days buying and selling gear in the bazaar to raise many hundreds of thousands of plats. I then spent those many hundreds of thousands of plats on buying the latest/greatest gear for my characters.
Well, that gear is now poopie and it looks like I can replace it with the latest buyable gear for under a hundred K. *sigh* The folks who call it “Ever-treadmill” might have the right idea. 
Tags: Digsby, Everquest, Gaming, mmorpg, vista
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2 Responses to “Fixed the Hitch in My Giddyup”
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Sometimes the resource hogs come from the weird place. Digsby still hasn’t gotten it completely right (a day after you post about better improvements). Improvements yes, but full-stable-non-greek release no.
Awesome that you were able to work it though!
Yeah, the irony of it being Digsby a day after I posted on it is classic