Question about sluggish comp for general PC games

Hello,

So recently, I've noticed when I play games, like on Super Nintendo via an emulator, or even like a 3D Game like Prince of Persia Warrior Within, my comp will randomly every five or 10 minutes, just noticeable slow down in frame rate for about five seconds, which obviously causes a lot of huge frustration.

I don't understand how it could even stall on simple games like Super Nintendo...

Anyway, so its an older machine running Windows XP, has an Athlon 3800+ single core cpu, X1650 XT video card, 3 gigs of ram, and a 200 gig HDD, that's pretty much full. I do have a spare HDD that I've only backed up my music on, so if its an hdd issue, I could move stuff to that drive too aka an additional 80 gig drive.

Any ideas? I tried scanning with Avast's 'quick' system scan but that took like 20 mins...

Either way, I have time to do a good full scan, so please let me know what free programs I should use to scan for any malware.

Thanks a bunch for reading my post!

A PC that old, it's not surprising. And emulators can be quite taxing

@HauntJemimah:

Your comp will do what every 5 min? You did not clarify and it looks like the sentence was missing a word

What is the emulator also I recommend Windows Security Essentials over something like a Avast. If You decide to install that make sure you delete Avast, you never want more than one Antivirus software.

@redskins26rocs: Ah I see

Yeah, I know its old... But damn, Zsnes is emulating Super Nintendo. I would maybe understand N64 Emus screwing up with frame rate..

But a game in question, whether it is playing a Super Nintendo emulator or Prince of Persia (a 3D game obviously), it'll lag for about 5 seconds, and resume, but I swear, its the same pattern everytime it happens.

I don't think its a video card issue because I updated my drivers, and they're the latest ones... ;(

@HauntJemimah: Free up space on your HDD. A computer can run like crap or have issues if the HDD is nearly full. Having only a single core CPU and a HDD that's "pretty much full" can cause a lot of slow down. You want to also be sure that you're not running other, unnecessary programs in the background. With that single core CPU you're going to get interuptions since you only have 1 core to handle anything the computer processes.

So, clean the HDD (free up space), then defrag it, then disable any unnecessary programs from running and see how things go from there.

Also, make sure you have your windows sufficiently updated or even install Windows 7. And defragmenting your HDD might help. Any chance malware or some sort of virus is causing the problem?

Is the slowdown only with this game or other games too?

It's an emulator so I don't think it's gonna run smooth like a native app.

Run a scan with Malwarebytes, if the hard drive is full, make some space, and defrag the hard drive.

Does it just do it on emulators? Do you have any PC games to test?

Might be overheating

I don't see any reason why your system would have any problems running SNES emulator. I was testing a faulty laptop with a dodgy southbridge a few weeks ago and it ran FFVI like butter, your specs are about 2 or 3 times better than what it had.

Sounds like something is hogging resources in the background. Open up task manager and see if anything is filling either the CPU or RAM. If everything seems fine there and you've been through what everyone else has said, you may have a hardware fault, most likely with the RAM.