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Hi,
About a year ago i purchased a new pc.

HP pavilion a6020a Home PC
Intel pentium 4 processor 641
512mb DDR2
160gb 3g SATA hard drive
Intel GMA 950 graphics

thats what it says on the side of the hardrive.

When i play an mmorpg or basically anything with relatively good graphics and a large community of players, its like im running on 1 frame per second. I dont know my exact fps during gameplay but its incredibly slow. For the most part i can play fine in the wilderness and stuff.
Sometimes i get a black screen, and then it says the display driver has crashed, im pretty sure i know the solution to that problem, which is to buy a new graphic card. But since im currently studying my money is very limited.
I use my pc for mostly gaming.

Now my question is, why is it so slow when i play games such as Wow.
Even older games seems to run slow, i have no idea why either. If someone could tell me why it runs so slow i would be sooooo greatful. I've been told its my ram, but i have friends with the same amount of ram playing Wow with little problem at all, apart from a lag here and there. I've also been told to upgrade my graphics card, or buy a new one. Yet once again my friends have older, unmodified pc's which run mmo's fine.

I have downloaded alot of games, and uninstalled them due to the problems i have stated. Wow seemed ok, in towns and stuff there were huge lags, sometimes so bad that i wouldnt move for 30-60 seconds.

Anyway, if i've missed out some important information about either my pc or anything else, please tell me. I really would love to find out what is wrong.

Thanks in advance

I just looked up your pc on HP. And it seems to only come with Vista, so I'm guessing thats what your operating system is.

You really need to upgrade the ram for it run well. I'm guessing your friends have windows XP. A couple of things to try -

1. Disable the aero glass effect, see instructions below:
Right click on desktop > select Personalise > Click Window Color and Appearance > Click Open classic appearance properties > select the Windows Vista Basic color scheme > Click Apply > Click OK

2. Update chipset and graphics card drivers. There are new chipset drivers available for your pc which were released April 2008. See HP link below.
Software & Driver downloadsHP Pavilion a6020a Desktop PC

3. If you have a USB thumb drive - try using ready boost. This will enable you to use your usb drive as an alternative to installing more ram. Please see link below for more information on this and how to set it up.

TweakVista.com - Boost your performance with ReadyBoost

hello axl.
I also purchased a hp a6020a about a year ago. after about 2 weeks I encountered the same symptoms that you described.
This issue is related to the igfx display driver. the intel onboard chipset stops responding. this issue affects not only hp has been reported on compaq acer and sony brands. As far as i know it only affects the users of Vista and first became known in vista beta testing by WoW users.

I contacted hp and intel and although hp were very nice they could offer no real help to resolve this issue. And intel also failed to offer any real solution.

I found the answer on another forum which suggested that installing a video card would resolve this issue. I was able to purchase a new xfx 8400gs video card for under $100 and installed it myself. this resolved the igfx issue. I have not had a problem since.

Increasing the ram will not resolve the igfx issue.

The hp a6020a shipped with 512mb ram which is a minimum. I would when possible increase the ram to 2gb to improve performance.

I hope this was a help to you axl.

regards.

andreww

Yes one year back PC's are not abled to play games because of some problems.
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kennedy