Performance drops every now and then.

[Jordaldo]

For about 3-5 days every 2 weeks or so, my Worold of Warcraft takes a serious performance dive. I have no idea why, but it is frustrating.

I have sifted through the stickies trying to find any relevant information and I have tried numerous things to try and find/fix the issue.

I have come up with nothing, and my best guess is that vista is doing something (maintenance perhaps?) at a regular interval in the background, allocating resources away from what I want to be doing. Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out what.

Using Process explorer, the only things taking up CPU is the idle process, WoW, vent, firefox, and yahoo. I have had everything closed and with WoW being the only thing running, and I still get this insane performance drop (down to 3-5 frames EVERYWHERE, and 1-2 frames when there are 10+players standing around. As opposed to my normal 15-20 fps.).

EDIT: Some additional details as I think of them:
- I get more frames when I am looking at the ground/off in a corner (I can only guess it's because there is less stress on my card) as opposed to there being no difference the rest of the time.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins1501/en/om_en/html/specs.htm

 

[richc46]

Go to search type task scheduler when the problem happens. Then see what is scheduled for that time.

 

[ilikefree]

Download Process Lasso and set the game to play in gaming mode.

Process Lasso, the Windows process priority optimizer!