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[Reelya]

That's the thing. I upgraded my PC from 4GB to 12GBs of RAM and completely turned the paging file off. Paging is slow, plus it causes wear and tear on your HDD. If you run out of paging memory, things just won't run at all, rather than "runs, but slow". If you can get away with it, run your games with no paging file activated.

You can always turn virtual memory completely off, reboot and try Skyrim without any paging file activated. Things will be fast, but you might get system out-of-memory errors if you're exceeding the 8GB of physical RAM you have. Ctrl-Alt-Del can tell you what's using memory. Browsers are the usual culprit for RAM hogs. Make sure to turn your browser off before running games. Lagginess could happen if you exceed physical RAM and the system starts shunting stuff back and forth to disk to "pretend" there's more RAM. Look out for the HDD light always being on. That's a giveaway that memory is depleted, and that state, called drive thrashing, causes a lot of wear and tear on the physical media.

[i2amroy]

That's the thing. I upgraded my PC from 4GB to 12GBs of RAM and completely turned the paging file off. Paging is slow, plus it causes wear and tear on your HDD. If you run out of paging memory, things just won't run at all, rather than "runs, but slow". If you can get away with it, run your games with no paging file activated.

An important note from that article I linked is that you should always have the paging file on, even if only for a minuscule amount, because there are a fair handful of microsoft programs that will crash and start throwing up weird errors if you turn it off completely (regardless of if they are actually using it or not). Of course it's up to you, but I figured it was worth mentioning.

[Reelya]

I'll keep that in mind, but so far I haven't had any issues at all.

[Sensei]

My laptop has two graphics cards for some reason. In dxdiag it shows Intel Integrated Graphics (or something like that) and I also have Nvidia Geforce 740M. (Maybe the problem with games is that they use the Intel graphics card instead of the Nvidia?)

I don't know if that's good for a gaming laptop. Sometimes games like Skyrim run smoothly (even modded). Other times it's really laggy (even without mods). I need advice please. Thanks in advance!

Didn't we have this conversation in the Cities thread or something? This sounds extremely like failure to utilize the Nvidia card, I have a similar laptop and making sure games are always using the Nvidia GPU and not the Intel GPU can be a huge hassle. I have a Geforce 660M, an older card, and I've never encountered a game that I can't at least run 30 FPS on low settings (except an early build of EQ Landmark).

Whenever you encounter a game Nvidia might not have heard of (which sadly includes a lot of high profile indie releases) make sure you find the executable (file with a name like game.exe), right click it, and set it to run with the Nvidia graphics card. Games with multiple executables because of a launcher or the like make this more difficult, but basically, you just want to find all the executables and set them to run with Nvidia by default. Sometimes setting the default GPU doesn't stick (very frustrating) but you can at least usually get them to run with your Nvidia card by choosing it each time you start the game.

If you have some games that run great and some that inexplicably don't, this is probably your issue. If you have games run great sometimes and not other times, it might be a heat or power issue (my laptop throttles WAY down when not plugged in, so I always plug it in to play games).

[Audioworm333]

Accidentally made a topic about this issue before I saw this thread, soooo I'll just copypaste:



So today my old, beat-up keyboard was discarded in favor of a new one, plus another one for when this one inevitably gives up the ghost. I've gotten used to the ritual of having to mess with the drivers whenever I get a new keyboard/whatever before it finally works, so I was doing that. However, in a klutzy move I managed to accidentally disable my mouse drivers, and my keyboard still wasn't working, and since I couldn't use either one of those I couldn't even move to the on-screen keyboard. I tried rebooting, but now I'm just stuck in the start-up screen.

What should I do? Is there anything that can be done now? Did I just permanently fuck up my ability to use my computer with one dumb mistake?

[Reelya]

Have you tried booting into safe mode? Click F8 as the OS loader starts. idk, but I've never owned a keyboard or mouse that needed anything except the generic drivers so I can't help you further with this.

Looking around, some people with similar issues have used a windows install disk and system restore.

[Audioworm333]

Have you tried booting into safe mode? Click F8 as the OS loader starts. idk, but I've never owned a keyboard or mouse that needed anything except the generic drivers so I can't help you further with this.

As I said, the keyboard isn't working. That's the reason I've gotten into this mess. But thanks anyway; any attempts to help are much appreciated.

(I am also posting this from a laptop in case anyone's wondering.)

[Reelya]

You should be able to F8 into safe mode. this is done before the operating system loads. so there are no driver issues yet. I'm guessing you've never booted a machine into safe-mode before?

If you can't get into safe mode then your issue isn't drivers. It's the BIOS keyboard settings. So go fix up your BIOS. That doesn't even have drivers.

[Audioworm333]

Safe mode is working. And yes, I've never booted a computer into safe mode before. Thanks very much.

[Audioworm333]

OK so I am getting into safe mode as it starts up just fine, and while I'm in the menus the mouse and keyboard work just fine. But is there any way to get the device manager up in there?

[Aklyon]

There should be, though I haven't used safe mode in a long time.

[Reelya]

Safe Mode is specifically for fixing your drivers / device manager. When in safe mode Windows only loads the most generic possible drivers, so your actual config won't stop it working.

You can find device manager via the control panel. Another way is to right-click on a "Computer" / "My Computer" or equivalent icon, and click Properties. The computer's Properties panel contains many useful links.

The easiest way to get things working is to just delete all drivers for keyboard and mouse, then reboot with normal mode. Windows should auto-detect everything and load generic drivers (the same ones that are working perfectly well in Safe Mode ). IDK, but I would never add a driver for a keyboard. I have never needed to do that in any version of Windows since Windows 3.1. Unless it's some amazingly cool special gaming keyboard that actually needs a driver, you should always just use the default Windows drivers. Special disks that come with hardware? See if it runs without that shit first before adding more crap to your system. More often than not, they're not needed and it's just another thing that can go wrong.

[Audioworm333]

Well perhaps I haven't been clear enough. Here's what's happening...

When I press F8 it takes me to a black screen with white text that show info about my PC and a thing reading Press Esc For Startup Menu. Well, I press ESC but can't seem to find any way to make the PC go into safe mode from there.

[Reelya]

I get it now, he got into the boot menu only. That's not fekking "safe mode" dude. You get into safe mode FROM the boot menu. Safe Mode is full graphical Windows, but with default drivers, and the words "safe mode" are plastered all over the screen. You'll know when you're in it. Here's more info, depending on your OS:

Windows 7:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ss/safe-mode-windows-7.htm

Windows 8:
http://www.howtogeek.com/107511/how-to-boot-into-safe-mode-on-windows-8-the-easy-way/

[Aklyon]

Yeah, if you don't specify your OS you'll get info on what people assume your OS is, usually Win7 at this point I'd think.