game stuttering

[PenCapChew7]

I am having minor, but noticable stutters in some of my games, particularly Diablo 2. I am calling to all PC gurus on this forum for your advice on how to optimize my system for games with no problems. A computer store said they would be glad to work on my problem, for 50 bucks an hour! I could buy a new PC by the time they get it done probably. Here are my system specs:
AMD athalon 1 Gig CPU
A7V133 Socket A motherboard
VIA Apollo KT133A Chipset(with 4in1 436 drivers on the advice these are the best for WIndows 98SE)
512 megs of RAM
Windows 98 SE
Visiontek GeForce 2 MX 400 64mb vid card.(driver 21.83)
VIA AC'97 Audio controller(WDM)latest driver 11-26-2001
Direct X 8.0


I was suggested by some people on other forums to make the following changes:
-change my AGP aperture to 32-64MB(he said setting it to half your system ram was a waste)
-turn off video rom bios shadow in BIOS
-turn off anti-aliasing in geforce applet
-disable vertical sync for D3D and open gl
-make sure PCI textures arent more than 5mb
-set mip map to best performance
-set cd rom cache settings to halfway or low
-virtual memory settings 256 min/max

Well I did those changes and I am using the 21.83 drivers and it seemed that performance isnt bad, its just the graphics kinda look funny, when i look at the floor in Aliens versus Predator 2, the floor graphics seem to shift and don't look like a normal floor would be like when moving over it... As for Diablo 2, I still get some occasional stuttering, but it definitley better than before. He also said that having a WDM controller for my audio card does cause problems, that i should use this one on this link : http://www.soyousa.com/drivers.html I downloaded the audio driver and its a exe file and when i click it I get a dos window. Now I have no clue what WDM is and how it effects my system. Should I buy a soundcard instead of having onboard sound? I hear bad things about the VIA chipset too. I just need opinions of people on this forum to help me get my system on track with games and have no problems. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[fred]

Hi PenCapChew7,

Most of what you have done I would rate as tweaks! There is something missing here! You have a good system. I have a lesser system and I am suffering no such glitches, and all I did was make sure that whatever games uses all the memory I have. Other than that, I haven't tweaked anything.

I can't help but wonder if the problem isn't more obvious - like the fact that there is something else running in the background. But I suppose you have checked that? Have you checked the general health of your system regards background tasks? You know how to do that. I am sure...do a ctl-alt-del and have a look see what is running. In fact I am sure you already have...

[mike breck]

Hi PenCapChew7,

As fred suggested, check the basics first.

Run a Scandisk in SafeMode to make sure your HD is in good shape.
Defrag your Hard Drive (I defrag about once a month).
Delete EVERTHING in C:\WINDOWS\TEMP on a regular basis.
Delete everything in C:\WINDOWS\TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES on a regular basis.

Before gaming:

"Ctrl+Alt+Del" and Endtask all background programs apart from Explorer and Systray (Anti-Virus may have to be disabled through it's own control panel).
Disable the Screensaver.

Try these things first before you try any more "tweaking".