I recently built a brand new PC (specs below) its all working fine and so far faultness. The only thing that im not sure about is that during Halo for example, as its the game ive been playing the most, i experience some slow downs, and 'stutters' during intense firefights with other players. I know this is common but what i wanted to know is whether this is normal, or should be happening with a PC with the specifications that i have listed below. Please could someone tell me whether the listed specs could still potentially have slow downs in a game such as Halo during times of intense firefights etc or graphical demand, or it is a cooling or fault related occurence.

Thanks.

Specs:
.Intel Pentium 4 800FSB, 2.8Ghz, Not Prescott
. Maxtor 80GB, Serial ATA Hard Disk
. Asus P4P800 Mobo, with Hyperthreading (enabled)
. Radeon 9600 128MB
. Kingston PC3200, 512mb RAM

thanks again.

You don't say what Internet connection you have, but as with most online games, it is not uncommon, and is know as lag. You may well have seen on online chat that the game is "lagging"

Your specs are well above most online games requirements

Many factors can affect your playability, amongst others

• The number of players on the games server, (Usually shown on the online game menu)
  
• The number of people using your particular exchange connection, (known as contention ratio)
  
• The distance of your computer to the server (can usually be determined by ping time)
  
• The quality of your line
  
• The number of people on your ISPs server
  
• Other players on a slower connection than your own. Computers are only as fast as the slowest link
  

I know this may sound daft but try the following

Avoid playing when our American cousins are awake, because when they are, there is a distinguishable decrease in internet speed.
Try to choose a server with a large capacity but with less than the maximum number of players on
Try and choose a server which only allows players with broadband connection

Thanks for your reply, yeah i know what you mean about playing online games and thats exactly correct, But what was really on my mind was that should these 'stutters' and slow downs happen in normal offline Halo play, note: it only happens when there is an intensive firefight taking place that requires a lot of Graphical processing to be done. But with the PC specs that i have should these stutters and slow downs even happen during even the most intense fire fights during OFFLINE game play, e.g. in Halo?, or is there a problem?

Thanks again.

Basically what i mean is that during an intensive firefight with lots of things going on at once on screen playing Halo, the game stutters and slows down. This is during OFFLINE play as well as online, so should this be happening with a PC with the above specs, or is it a fault related problem that is causing this?

if so, is it too much heat etc, or another problem.

A lot will depend on what is going on in the background, ie programs or services running, especially on XP

Personally, I feel that there are far too many services running in the background for the average home user not connected to a network, and I tend to pare these down to an absolute minimum

To find out what you can and cannot disable, have a read of Black Vipers' Services configuration page