I recently realized that my games and even my modeling programs are experiencing video stuttering problems (repeatedly runs for about 5-8 seconds then pauses for a second) I have been searching for a solution to this problem for a while now and have tried the following:

- adjusting video settings and resolutions in the games including Vsync
- tried various nvidia card drivers including the latest one
- exiting all non-essential programs in the background (even cleaned up my startup from msconfig)
- dusted my pc with the air-dusting thingy
- tried enabling/disabling triple buffering as per a suggestion of some post somewhere
- did a registry, spyware and virus scan/cleanup as well as defragged my HD
- a bunch of other smaller random fixes i can't remember right now

NONE of these made any difference. So far I've only tried Bioshock and Dark Messiah but i'm pretty sure its the same problem, My Zbrush program experiences similar problems when rendering my models real time. I'm not exactly sure when this problem started but it was a few days before i got Bioshock that i noticed this problem in Zbrush. a few weeks before that i had Tomb Raider Anniversary running fine on max settings. Oh and i also tried the beta driver for Bioshock with no results.

Hopefully i don't have to replace my video card (dont have a lot of cash) because I've had burnt out video cards before and they displayed different problems that what i'm experiencing now.

I have an intel pentium dual core 3.00 GHz, 2 GB Ram, about 150 Gb left of free space, and a GeForce 7800 GT video card.

Any help would be appreiciated.

oh and i also installed latest directX