Games freeze and lag

First, here's my hardware

P4 2.0 GHz
512MB DDR RAM
GeForce 4 Ti 4200
MSI 848P Neo

My PC's been running fine and have had no problems in the past. It could run games like Doom 3, FEAR, Lineage 2, The Sims 2, Fable, etc great and with no or little graphic setting lowering.

Now a while back, I installed RF Online and it seemed to be more processing/graphic/memory intensive. It was buggy, too, so it gave me the Memory Dump blue screens a lot - I never got that from the other better games.

Now after a couple of months of playing it practically everyday, my PC's been slower in loading/playing games.

Playing Fable after a short while, the game starts out fine but suddenly starts to lag like it was a memory leak then ultimately hang up on loading menus. Same with Lineage 2 and The Sims 2.

I thought it was the Paging File so I increased it, moved it to a dedicated drive but to no avail. My friend says it might be the physical RAM.

What do I do? =/

Oh yeah, in addition I don't really turn off my PC - but most of you don't shut down your computers, too, right?

1. buy +512 ram. helps quite much
2. defrag, scan for spy/ad/virus

Already did a Defrag, Spyware/Adware and Virus scan.

I wanna know what's wrong with the RAM since it worked fine before =/

I've had the RAM for over 2 years. Could it be due to overusage?

>>1
Stop using Internet Explorer

>>5
I use Firefox -_-

>>6
Stop using Failfux.

FORMAT

>>7
What does the browser have to do with it?

google memtest to check your ram out.
that or there's alot of heat damage to the motherboard from overuse (I'm assuming you don't have proper cooling to run your system the way you do)
you might actually have to go buy a new comp...

did you try defragging? restarting? scanning for viruses and spy/adware? basically make sure you get the basics out of the way...and I assume you've checked out the alt+ctrl+del menu to see what was eating ur sys resources.

Yeah, defragged, restarted, virus and spy/adware scan done.
As for resources, I did find out recently that my 512mb isn't enough so it takes a bit of the paging file, too.

I guess I have to upgrade my RAM. And maybe reformat.

I'll try memtest, too, thanks.

>>8
>>12
Format won't clear your data

if you're buying ram anyway it's time to get a new system

A new motherboard and processor will cost you half what the ram for your current machine will, so you might as well assemble a whole new system. Check it out; I do not lie


learn about ram timings and stuff so your next system is optimized. Reuse your hard disk and everything else, maybe consider getting a new case. You should be able to get a whole new system for less than $300 if you know what to look for