All games

My games lag ever minute or so.
1st, my system:
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Mobo: ASUSTeK Computer INC. M2N-VM DVI Rev x.xx

Bus Clock: 200 megahertz

Bios: American Megatrends Inc. 0315 01/09/2008

Proc: 3.00 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core
256 kilobyte primary memory cache
2048 kilobyte secondary memory cache

Ram:Kingston pc 6400 (800mhz) 3072 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot 'DIMM0' has 1024 MB
Slot 'DIMM1' is Empty
Slot 'DIMM2' has 1024 MB
Slot 'DIMM3' has 1024 MB

Video : NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT with 512 ddr3

sound: SB Audigy

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Here are my games.
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The witcher
Civ4
Halo
Battlefield 1942
World in conflict
Heroes of might and magic 3
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Here are the problems:
In everything except games the computer is nice and fast
In games no matter what game they will become jerky and laggy every few seconds (like 20 seconds) except halo
halo gets lagy avery 2 or 3 minutes.
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What I have done to correct this.
1. Update Video drivers.
2.Update bios
3 close all running aplications
4 ran everything off of my external drive
5. set my computer for best performance (on the advanced tab in system properties)

6. set my paging file to 150% of my physical ram

7. defraged my hdd

what else can I do to solve this issue?

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ohh btw i have xp 64

 

Try swapping the stick in DIMM3 to DIMM1. That might improve performance.

With the exception of Halo, have to checked for the latest patches on those games?

 

Yea I made sure I had everything up to date. I'll do the mem stic slot change

 

I put another 1 gig stick in the open slot and it has almost no lag on civ4
I think it just needed to run in dual channel

 

and stop running off an external drive, that just slows stuff down.

 

I moved everything to my boot drive already. I will test with the witcher next.

 

Yeah, not running in Dual channel seems to be the most common problem. The computer keeps checking to see if the other stick has magically appeared.

 

still cant play the witcher, uninstalled and reinstalled the game same thing.. I wonder if I ran the games off a second internal HDD