Ok guys. I have a pretty decent system. It's an Athlon XP 1800+ with 768 MB Ram on a windows XP Professional Edition; I also have a GeForce II MMX video card with 64MB RAM and the soundblaster audigy system. Still after playing a while my screen, everything, freezes for some period of time and then it resumes again, only to freeze up again. This most commonly happens when I get involved into some heavy battle but that is what troubles me, my system is well above the reccommended so I don't understand where the trouble will be. Also if it is helpful while in between the freeze ups the game moves slowly as if there isn't enough memory!!! or something. Even the music seems to get stuck. I really don't know what is wrong. I tried closing any background programs (including my anti-virus program) and still the same.
If any of you guys can help me with some ideas I would greatly appreciate.

[ October 01, 2002, 10:23: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

Few suggestions to solve the problem:

1. You have no enough harddisk space, which makes the cache insufficient. Check the harddisk space and clean up some spaces if required. Standard cache size is 175MB.

2. Launch the ICD2 Config to check the cache size, make it to 175MB. Also try to minimize the requirements, ie: 800x600 for graphics, no fancy effects etc (tuning down the General, Graphics, Audio bars at the GENERAL tab)

3. Close all background programs (such as antivirus etc) to free up more memories.

IWD2 is a nice game.. hope it wont cause you anymore trouble

[ October 01, 2002, 03:55: Message edited by: saukoon ]

Yeah, that MX should be more than enough for IwD2. Not to mention that 1800, so it's not your hardware.

Turn down the number of AI updates. I usually keep mine set to 32000, and put in waypoints if there's a long distance to go. Also, look into your drivers. I'm using the 40.71's, but for that MX400 of yours, you would do well with the 30.42's or whatever the WHQL drivers are around that area. There's no point in you updating to the "latest" drivers with that card; you will see a performance degrade if anything.

Other than that, yeah; cleaning out your hard disk might help. with 3/4gig of ram, you don't need a cache size over 100meg, unless you're working with photoshop and premiere a lot. Or Autocad.

I *always* make a 3gig system partition, and then partition out the rest of my drive however. Right now I have about 3gig system, 50gig for games, and about 2.6gig for general stuff. That keeps my system files on the outside of the hard disk, which makes my os as fast as possible.

Other than that, you can overclock that processor and video card, but since your card has sdram on it, you won't see much of a performance gain. Geforce2's are notoriously memory locked.

I have P4 1700Mhz, 512Mb and Geforce 3. Plenty of that cache too and it always starts to slow down a lot in big battles. I doesnt completely freeze.. just slows down and lags etc. Especially when there are multiple spell effect and tons of some creatures in the picture.
I have Windows XP too so I guess that is the reason. When I played BG2 on Windows 98 with lot slower PC it didnt never lag like that. When I changed to XP even BG2 slowed down sometimes in larger battles.

Actually it is probably hardware.
IWD2 has problems running on high-end machines. I'm not joking.

It seems that inside Infinity Engine there is something similar to Oracle's installer which doesn't want to run on PentiumIV machines. Anyway, there is no universal cure for this yet, please be patient as BIS is working on the patch for that issue.

[ October 02, 2002, 17:26: Message edited by: Extremist ]

I am not particularly technical so take my advice with a grain of salt, but- I ran the dxdiag troubleshooter and followed all the advice, i.e. lowered pretty much every form of acceleration there is, and the game ran much more smoothly for me. You'd think the reverse would be true, but there it is. I still can't go to the global map without crashing but that's when I export the game to my husband's computer, move to the new map, and then import the game back to my own PC. So if you are still having trouble after tweaking your accelerations, maybe you should get married. :)