im not sure

how do i check that?

Check There (for WMP) Sry for the late reply

I had this problem. It drove me mad for about 2 weeks and then I started reinstalling drivers. Sure enough, M$ had updated my NIC driver and it was makeing everything go to s***. The stutter effect on the desktop was a particularly nice side-effect.

Hope this helps.

Hello,, for sure you have anitivrus software in your PC but did you check if your anvirus specially with functionality of Firewall just a thought maybe it is trying to stop your app when you run it and causing your system lagging. I think about this when i played C&C Generals Zero Hour for the first time that i must allow Game.dat to run on my system firewall.

I just put together a new Athlon system as follows and was experiencing extreme lag in games also:

ASUS A8N-SLI

AMD Athlon X2 3800+

nVidia GeForce 7800GT

I had the same lag problem with both the 32 and the 64 bit versions of XP. To make a very long story short, turns out the problem was the dual CPU cores. Counter-Strike(all versions) and many other games just couldn't handle the 2 CPU's and would freak out.

To solve the problem I have to set the game to run on a Single CPU! I start the game, then I immediately alt-tab back to my desktop (so the game is still running in the background). Then I start task manager look in the processes tab for the games running process. I right-click the process and select Set Affinity. I then un-check one of the CPU's and then close task manager.

After setting the game to only one CPU, I alt-tab back into the game and everything is great. The only problem is that I have to do this every single time I start the online game. It's a pain in the a**... but it solves the problem.

Edited November 18, 200520 yr by Nois3

This can happen if a single-threaded application starts a thread on the second CPU. If the thread on the first CPU has to wait on the thread running on the second CPU, you get ntdll in a criticalsection wait state - the first thread is waiting for some data returned from the second thread, but since the application is not multi-processor aware, the second thread isn't able to access the first thread on the other processor.

Setting the processor affinity is the only way to get around this issue (or cleanup the application's internal code ). I see it happen with some regularity, and the debugger always shows a thread running in a loop, or a thread spawned on a second processor that causes the first thread to hang (and start eating up CPU time, too).

I'm not saying this is what has happened, but it's possible.