Hello,

I play an MMO called Eve-Online. I'm in a pretty large alliance (1400+ members) and we are at war against another large alliance. So as you can imagine we have large battles with like 200+ Ships all firing and moving and creating **** loads of lag. There are some ways to reduce the lag in game, playing with graphics settings and the like.

What I wanna know is if there is anything I can do outside the game to reduce lag. I realize that a good deal of it has to do with the servers the game uses aswell as the bandwidth of my internet connection. But any advice big or small would be welcome. Thanks!

Close ALL of your useless programs.If you have any Webbrowsers open close them.
Especially firefox.At points it wasted half of my cpu.

Hi DarkRanger, the most likely cause is that with over 2000 online characters online...you're going to get lag, either CPU lag (low FPS) or server lag (high ping).
Either way, with that much action on your screen at once...there's not alot that can be done. Your best bet is to close any software that's not necessary.
You'd obviously have some team speak sort of software to talk to your alliance, but give it a test without this running - as it will be a drain on your computer.

Another possibility - if you only have 1gb of RAM, I'd suggest upgrading to 2gb...this might help a substantial amount.

Try turning off any graphic enhancements in your game... I am not
familiar with your game but on games I play I can turn oiff things like shadows and lightmaps.

Thanks for your suggestions!

I knew about closing programs and turning off graphics settings (thanks for trying them anyway :-) ).

The RAM is deffinatly a good idea, I do only have 1 Gig. Another thing I was wondering is, would getting Vista help? I heard it helps gaming.

Dark ranger, i'm not sure who told you that Vista helps game performance...they'd be incorrect.
To make vista run properly, and have the games run at your current level of play, you need to double your memory from 1gb to 2gb, at least.

Vista increases your graphical apperance (and only when you have adirectx10 card), not the gaming performance.

You could also reduce ping by closing all internet messengers (ym, msn, etc)