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Tech - EQ Performance discrepancy, at a dead end. help? (1 Viewer)

ToeJamSamy

Seasoned veteran member
Joined
Nov 21, 2020
RedCents
574¢
Ok, so i have built and run and fixed whatever dozens of pcs (mainly 5-20yrs old) and Im currently at a loss for what to change/fix here.

The issue is 10 min zone times. No exaggeration here either, watching other screens for other machines i can see the fellowship insignia timer run out long before the zone is finished on this one machine when theyre all zoning to the campfire for example. its a good 7ish minutes before the loading bar even pops up-which itself moves pretty quickly- then it sits there for several more minutes before finally finishing the zone.

I have numerous identical machines, at least afaik they are identical, not all from same seller but all same base model and same specs and OS. the most recent one i decided to set up when one of my older selfbuilts died, is not running eq remotely as well as the others. i5 3.1ghz cpus, 16gb 1333mhz ram, 2tb hdds in all. onboard graphics in all (though the one im having issues with had some crap vid card in it for some reason, and i took it out trying to help...which it did, somewhat, but i have other better cards that will fit if i think i need, that i know work fine for eq that i planned to put in if i found the onboard on this particular machine was dead, these are all refurbed machines)

This particular machine however was not the same specs when i received it as the others, it was 8gb ram not 16. so i added a pair of 4gig sticks i had to make them match. They all have win 10 pro. the first one i ever used for eq of these i did NOTHING to it but install and run the game, and its not even a clean install, its a 10+ year old copy of my original eq folder. That machine i have zero issue zone times or lag or anything, and i run 3 accts on it 24/7 (not afk etc and 2 are baz, but theyre still running all that time, no reboots etc unless theres a long power outtage, no eq reloads unless a patch- though that machine recently had a weird change in its behaviour, thats a different and minor issue)

Ive optimized my ram and shut down every extraneous process etc on the new machine, swapped in and out different sets of ram sticks, in and out vid card etc. Originally it had nasty amounts of lag visible at char select, so i didnt even test zonetimes until i cleared that all up. Now, visible lag is gone, once i finally do load into the game char moves just fine no hiccups or jerking, but there is a delay when i CLICK anything, even open or closing a window in eq, and the zonetime is excrutiating: about 10 minutes. I have no idea what else to check for the zone times. Ive popped in and out multiple wifi dongles ive used with eq on other machines fine, just to be sure (and my ping is only 77ms according to eq, better than all my other machines, so that is not the problem) Im just not sure what else could be the issue. I did change a bunch of settings initially to try to fix the video lag i saw, but even if zone caching was altered, entering the same zone multiple times should be faster than the first time, so it's not that.

Any ideas? Ive never had a zoning issue except when i was trying to play on satellite (ok not play, chat and maybe zone elsewhere to look at stuff, playing is impossible on satellite) but even on satellite i dont think my zone times were THIS long, they could disconnect sometimes, and they sucked, but this is worse.

*my other machine that always ran perfect etc: recently i changed something to make its new monitor appear correctly though was same size etc as old. after this change however, when i alt+tab, the swap is no longer instant but the screen turns black for a full second or so before switching windows. not sure which setting caused this but it doesnt make much sense to me. it also doesnt hurt anything since the only accts boxed on it are traders, the 1 acct that gets played stays foreground 99% of the time anyway. But, if anyone has seen this before and could help find which setting caused it, it'd be great :) im not even sure if i changed anything in windows or if it was JUST the monitor's settings. i may have changed windows settings though since i was futzing with windows display settings on my main machine at the time to try to stop the resizing that win10 does on larger resolutions when theyre turned on/off etc
 
just remembered something that might be the same issue: one of my first attempts at fixing was to update the vid driver for the card thatwas in it...and that process took forever too. now that makes no sense to me but maybe it was searching onlilne the whole time idk. I updated driver again for the onboard card when i removed the crap 256mb one(LOL) and that too took forever but was still considerably faster than the previous driver search. being that im on an acband network, on fios, with a tried and tested dongle in the same location as previous usage, idk what could cause such an issue. i have no issues loading webpages though.
 
i havent even installed mq2 on the machine til i knew it was functioning correctly for eq. for a test just now on regular eqlog, i just did /log off and am now zoning to see if that has any effect.
yeah eq game logs can definitely cause issues especially on performance sensitive machines

give that a shot
 
improvement but still very slow comparatively. ive turned down nearly everything to min or off on this particular eq install to try to solve the issues, but not on any other machine. it just seems to me that there must be a windows setting or hardware issue that im not seeing that is having this effect, since i have multiples with identical mobo/cpus and ram sizes/types/speeds. all are on sata hdds (of that machine type that is) but its possible the hdd has an issue. will run a check on the disk to rule that out, but i had zero delays when i partitioned it as i always do. windows was already set up when i turned this one on though, unlike on any others. i did not have 20thousand questions to answer etc, so im not sure what settings from default have been changed that i didnt change personally. i did check that it is set to run for best performance though.
 
I use partition wizard a lot and am just finishing checking the windows partition with surface test, no problems. its also scanning at a good 11k MBps: half the speed of checking my ssd on THIS machine(my real beast) half the speed of testing fairly new usb3.0 external drives on this machine, and 10x the speed of testing an old sata drive that i knew had bad sectors (320gb should hint at its age) I didnt run the test on the eq etc partition yet because waiting for 1.8tb is a lot longer than 110gb lol, but by the speed it ran the pc hardware function as well as the drive itself seem to be as expected. even more confused now lol.

edit: and all hdd tests came out good. tried going to fullscreen instead of windowed, since that is what i run on the other one just like it: not a single difference in zonetimes. been using evac/egress to test zonetimes since the start and end are always the same. it's down to about 2.5min longer than my slowest zoner on any other machine, that change occurred with the /log off which is also why i thought maybe it was a hdd thing, but no. i mean i could live with 2.5min rather than 10+ but i could be 3 zones away with the rest of my crew by that point, and it still doesnt make any sense why its so different. the difference between the machines at this point is just WHICH ms certified refurbisher i bought from. having turned down enormous amounts of settings compared to the good one just to eliminate video lag that shouldnt be. The delay in some buttonpushes does seem to be gone, so it should be completely playable since i dont zone often once im where im going, but.. im just at a loss for what is wrong. Windows settings really makes me wonder because this one had various group policies in place that arent default and no first-use questionnaire etc makes me think maybe they didnt reinstall windows so much as remove other shit from the old install (these are business machines). Im wondering if i reinstall windows myself or even just clone the hdd from the good machine, if it will fix everything or not. idk if i want to live with these zonetimes or spend more time trying to diagnose it , or reinstall/clone another win10 installation(that has the correct drivers already installed to boot, yay) but that decision is on me if i dont get any more suggestions overnight i guess. i jsut dont know what windows settings etc could effect zonetimes in eq, or network times in general since the vid driver updates took so long too. the fact the vid lagged so much to start was also odd, so i will try adding a different card before i give up at least, so the video performance issue anyway.

i only do what i have to in windows as far as settings group policy, regedit, powershell etc, so im no expert. i deal much more with hardware issues and new builds. If theres some windows expert inhouse that might have a suggestion it would be wonderful :)
 
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I resell a fair amount of these older off-lease corporate HP and Dell systems. Intel CPUs especially have been getting a lot of microcode updates through the Windows updates process.

Start at the base hardware and ensure you've installed the latest BIOS and Chipset drivers, and then all the newest factory hardware drivers. Obviously reboot a lot during driver updates. Then use IOBit's free driver booster which will get even newer drivers for things like your network silicon.

Do the graphics drivers last. I strongly recommend you use the DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) utility first. Then use the factory site for your graphics. I assume it's UHD630 from Intel so use the Intel Driver and Support Assistant to ensure you get the latest supported driver for that specific chipset.

Then make sure Windows itself is completely up-to-date.

Then run PatchMyPC to ensure all application software is totally up-to-date.

Then run the Disk Cleanup tool on your C: drive, then do a disk optimization. By this point in the process everything will be the latest & greatest and your disk will be optimized for the best performance.

If you are still having performance issues you'll want to begin doing some diagnostics like running Speccy to review your CPU and HDD temperatures. Check Windows Event Log for anything anomalous. Check for stupid stuff like poor ethernet cabling or your wireless NIC connecting at G speeds instead of N. If connected via one method try the other as a cross-check. I've seen wired NICs connect at the original 10BaseT 10Mb speed rather than 100 or 1000. Another thing to check is your MTU on TCP/IP v4. 1500 is the default but a few podunk ISPs prefer 1492. Packet fragmentation leads to packet retransmits which really kills zoning times.

There's lots of things you can check/do and hopefully something will click as you work through the list.
 
i just fixed it. dumbest fucking thing ever, but whatever. now, the lag i was having could be gone now i put a better vid card in though it shouldnt have been bad to start with....but it turns out, because i needed to connect to my network drives i had to be on the ac band of my router so i popped in the brand new dongle i'd gotten and never used, before i ever tried eq(i used it to pull eq off my network) before that i had been using an ancient b/g, MAYBE n dongle. just on a whim, after installing new vid card and not seeing improvement in the obnoxious zonetimes, i swapped the newest for the oldest usb dongle. boom logged in in 20seconds or less lol. so i got a total shit wifi dongle, ill save it for the machine thats just gonna be for browsing and writing i guess. Now to put all my graphics settings BACK up where they should be and see how it performs. idk how much the wifi was affecting that either. my latency was only 83ms, 85ms now on the ancient one, so i had no reason to suspect it, plus i could browse np. however, everytime ive gone to update drivers on the various gpus ive tested, itd take 10+ minutes to search and dl them, so on a whim i tried the stupid dongle. /facepalm do people even do that anymore or am i just old?

thanks all for the suggestions, i will keep anything new in mind on future machine changes. ive never had any major problem with eq on any machine no matter how shitty it is, so im not wellversed in eq troubleshooting byeond run as administrator lol
Redcents coming when they reset for the day, thanks guys.
 
I resell a fair amount of these older off-lease corporate HP and Dell systems. Intel CPUs especially have been getting a lot of microcode updates through the Windows updates process.

Start at the base hardware and ensure you've installed the latest BIOS and Chipset drivers, and then all the newest factory hardware drivers. Obviously reboot a lot during driver updates. Then use IOBit's free driver booster which will get even newer drivers for things like your network silicon.

Do the graphics drivers last. I strongly recommend you use the DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) utility first. Then use the factory site for your graphics. I assume it's UHD630 from Intel so use the Intel Driver and Support Assistant to ensure you get the latest supported driver for that specific chipset.

Then make sure Windows itself is completely up-to-date.

Then run PatchMyPC to ensure all application software is totally up-to-date.

Then run the Disk Cleanup tool on your C: drive, then do a disk optimization. By this point in the process everything will be the latest & greatest and your disk will be optimized for the best performance.

If you are still having performance issues you'll want to begin doing some diagnostics like running Speccy to review your CPU and HDD temperatures. Check Windows Event Log for anything anomalous. Check for stupid stuff like poor ethernet cabling or your wireless NIC connecting at G speeds instead of N. If connected via one method try the other as a cross-check. I've seen wired NICs connect at the original 10BaseT 10Mb speed rather than 100 or 1000. Another thing to check is your MTU on TCP/IP v4. 1500 is the default but a few podunk ISPs prefer 1492. Packet fragmentation leads to packet retransmits which really kills zoning times.

There's lots of things you can check/do and hopefully something will click as you work through the list.
thanks for the info. if i have to reinstall etc illluse this. it's possible my shitty machine that was supposed towor b s ab bse o i am ggona yt iiprr ii I bought a couple hp 8200 SFs like 6 months back and they were awesome. i5 2400 8gb ram(they accidentally shipped both with 16gb though lol) and 2tb hdd with win10 PRO. pro was a make or break point, but when i ordered they were SUPPOSED to have 7pro on them. i'll live, with the unexpected double ram it's fine.

The onboard vid you mention isnt it, i think it was intel 2000 or something but id have to look, either way, it worked just fine on my bard machine where i have 3 accts running at once without a card. now i jsut put a card in the 3rd 8200 id bought last month but never opened. unfortunately that one was from a different refurbisher(theyre all ms certified refurbs or id have just bought a barebones or whatever and refurbed myself, but all the parts are there etc so better value when its 100-135bucks everytime. i hate how amazons prices go up everytime you put something in your cart and dont buy it rightaway. the next day the prices always go up. the first refurber id bought from doesnt have any more posted or id go with them because the bonus double ram was a real nice addition lol, but i have dozens of ddr3 sticks around and have no problem upgrading 8 to 16 as needed.

before i decidedto hook this 3rd one up, we'd ordered a bunch of the 8200 USDT's for 89bucks. they were SUPPOSED to have 8gigs ram but came with 4 so we're messing with the returns etc on that right now(ordered 7 of them) i suppose after this turn of events i should try running eq on the one id messed with, but with a better wifi dongle and see if it works fine with the 4. theyre both 8200, both 10 pro, both were supposed to be 8gb ram (the sff and usdt) but the whole aim was to cut down electric consumption, and i knew how well the 8200s were running from october, so i figured those would be the best bet, especially at that price. now, to see if they're gonna mail us 14sticks of 4gig laptop ram, or pay to ship back all the machines (6 are unopened) and then refund the 700ish bucks (with tax). $88.89 wasthe price which is pretty damned good, and advantage to the USDTs, is that despite having laptop mobos, theyre running dt cpus, so you dont get the loss of power there. i jsut wanna kick myself for the stupid dongle causing all the issues, and now i gotta hook that tiny one (it uses on average 20w as opposed to this machine im typing on using 700-1k lol) the sff's use 40-65 im guessing on average, sicne their psu's are double the wattage of the usdt's and the 20w figure is a long running average, not the psu watttage.

anyway, appreciate the input, will add the redcents when they reset, and now im off to find somewhere to hook up the minipc and see if it runs eq fine with the right connection lol. i already had upgraded that one to 6gb ram, could only steal 1 4gig sticks from al aptop, but should be just fine unless they screwed something up in their refurb. my original assumption about the 8200 sff vs usdt was probably right all along and ive wasted the past 5 days going back and forth with first the usdt then the sff trying to get them to be better...when they were fine all along. lol.

i always build my own machines, but when ti comes to alts, it's always done form graveyard scraps so when this last one had shit the bed (really was just the hdd, but my "new" scrap hdd didnt improve anything so i started looking around) i randomly ran across micro pcs on amazon and was getting quite interested since id already done the math and my main pc here uses 1/3 or the power of the entire 6bedroom 4k sf house does all winter in snowcountry, figured i should start looking into repping my older powersucking heatproducing fulltowers with something a bit more efficient. for the price figure you cant go wrong, with the particular specs on them, but i was sure id made a huge mistake LOL. turned out that huge mistake was the fuckign wifi not the computers :)
 
Tech - EQ Performance discrepancy, at a dead end. help?

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