Game keeps freezing, help please

[cedarfarms]

For the past few days my online games just kept freezing up 10-15 minutes into the game and i kept brushing it off thinking it was somebody else, or maybe it was related to the servers being upgraded or whatever. Sadly it has continued to happen so now im pretty sure it is me for some reason. What happens is the game just flat out freezes for like 3-4 minutes, sometimes it will unfreeze and the game will continue a bit laggy but you can play, other times it just is stuck and the only way to get out of game is to close aoe. The entire time the game is frozen i can type and and see what other players are saying and i have never dropped from a game, which is odd because that is the opposite of what usually happens when someone is lagging. For this reason i dont think it is my internet, but i might be mistaken. Does anyone have any ideas about why this is happening and how i can fix it? I tried lowering my graphics but it really hasnt worked. I play on an asus gaming laptop, its about a year old and I keep it in good shape, so i really hope its not something wrong with my computer.

[Metis]

Clean your computer -- overheating in laptops is one of the prime reasons for computer problems. Search on YouTube for your model and you should find disassembly and cleaning instruction. Take care to properly reapply thermal compound/pads if you unseat any heatsinks.

Also, make sure that your general computer maintenance is up to date and your Windows install has no errors. Run Windows Update. Go to the manufacturer's website and check that you have the latest drivers. Download the free version of Malwarebytes and scan for viruses. Defragment your hard disk (Post Win 7, defrag will trim your SSD with if you have one). Run Chkdsk /r from an admin command prompt and reboot to let it check and repair your disk. Also, run SFC /scannow from an admin command prompt and let it check and repair Windows.

You also may consider re-installing the game. If you have Steam you can easily check the integrity of the game cache without reinstalling.

Finally, make sure that Windows is automatically managing your page file and you have plenty of hard disk space left. Your system won't run well if your hard disk is nearly full.

[cedarfarms]

Thank you metis, appreciate it

[noissance]

Clean your computer -- overheating in laptops is one of the prime reasons for computer problems. Search on YouTube for your model and you should find disassembly and cleaning instruction. Take care to properly reapply thermal compound/pads if you unseat any heatsinks.

Also, make sure that your general computer maintenance is up to date and your Windows install has no errors. Run Windows Update. Go to the manufacturer's website and check that you have the latest drivers. Download the free version of Malwarebytes and scan for viruses. Defragment your hard disk (Post Win 7, defrag will trim your SSD with if you have one). Run Chkdsk /r from an admin command prompt and reboot to let it check and repair your disk. Also, run SFC /scannow from an admin command prompt and let it check and repair Windows.

You also may consider re-installing the game. If you have Steam you can easily check the integrity of the game cache without reinstalling.

Finally, make sure that Windows is automatically managing your page file and you have plenty of hard disk space left. Your system won't run well if your hard disk is nearly full.

Is this why the game lags on max settings? i have an alienware and i dont think it should lag...

[Metis]

I've talked to some of the mods and developers over the years and, ironically, they say that the game sometimes functions better on older systems than on newer ones. Primarily this has to do with processor configuration, memory management and that the game is optimized for version 9.0c of Directx. Optimization has a lot to do with performance. People with top-end graphics cards are sometimes disappointed with performance if their AMD card is playing a game optimized for NVIDIA cards or vice versa.

The game only utilizes two or three cores. Sometimes, setting only three cores active during a gaming session will help things. There are several posts in the old Agecomm forums about setting affinity if you are interested.

The same goes for memory management. AOE III is an old 32-bit game. Were that it were 64-bit, then we could have it utilize our 8 GB plus systems to their fullest capacity. Unfortunately, the game only uses about 3 GB or RAM before it starts swapping memory out the page file. If you have removed the page file or have it not configured right the game will think its out of RAM and freeze.

However, lag on a laptop about 15-20 min in is usually a heat issue. You can test this by running Prime95 to stress your system while monitoring resources and temps. If your system is overheating you will see a clampdown.

Another thing that causes multiplayer lag is network traffic. You may have a fast connection overall but have a few iPhones and tablets on the home network active and they quickly eat up the bandwidth. Note that you can give your gaming computer network priority in the router protocols.

Setting graphics to the lowest settings is always a good place to start when troubleshooting lag. I have a pretty good system, though it's no longer top-end. However, I still get some scrolling stutter with graphics settings maxed out so I set shadows and shaders a bit lower than max.

[cedarfarms]

@Metis

notification

i went into control panel and i see that there are two display adap, intel hd graphics 4600 and Nvidia Geforce GTX 870m, should i disable one of these and if so which one do you think?

[momuuu]

Id look at other things than hardware at first. Or well, just test it the easy way. Play a game with AIs and see what happens, does it freeze? Do you experience any lag or frame drops before the freeze (because if you do not I would be confused if it were a hardware issue)? Also, have you recently changed your hotkeys?

[iNcog]

I think that your HDD is just full of shit. How full is your HDD?

Are you confident enough to reinstall windows? you'll lose all your data and programs installed, but a clean install is just that: clean. you'd also need to reinstall drivers

[cedarfarms]

@jerom

notification

I uninstalled and reinstalled the game so my hotkeys reset and i had to redo them, could that be causing some of this?

[momuuu]

@jerom

notification

I uninstalled and reinstalled the game so my hotkeys reset and i had to redo them, could that be causing some of this?

Hotkeys can cause lag. Ask someone here how to backup your hotkeys, or remember them, and reset them. Then test if it still lags.

How did the AI test game go?

[deleted_user]

Hotkeys. See: viewtopic.php?t=4861

[Garja]

Btw what's exactly about the hotkeys that make the game lag.