Win7 is breaking my balls

I kept having steam disconnect issues and not being able to bring up the ingame overlay with shift+tab so i decided to re-install windows last saturday. While i was at it i installed Win7. I installed all my hardware drivers (latest versions), the only ones i had to install were my display and sound driver, the rest were done by windows.

Now when i started playing in the pug on sunday i had terrible lag!! When i move my mouse the screen just goes in slow motion, frames are missing, and a really low FPS of like 20. I test drived orange with tendo last night and no problems. So it seems for some reason my CPU and graphic card can't handle the same like it could before when i was running XP.

Major changes:

-Installed Win7
-Installed updated display driver

I even tried to play orange_x3 with all display settings set to lowest and it was still hell.

Any suggestions?

My CPU: AMD Athlon 3500 - 2.2GHz
Display card: ATI Radeon HD3650 - 512MB
RAM: 2GB DDR2

RAM?
antivirus?

use ctrl-shift-esc to bring up the task manager and check to see what's hogging your resources.

You changed your OS meaning you have to update all your drivers and updating your BIOS couldn't hurt either. You can usually find the most recent drivers on the website of your computer manufactuer organized by model number.
Also, sometimes the new drivers come with new hardware heavy functions, you could lower these of course.

Edit: ADAM has a point with RAM, win7 uses more ram (512MB~1GB) then XP (256MB) so you might just be low on it.

I have a MSI motherboard and went to the automatic update service page of MSI (it installs an IE browser addon that scans your hadware), it said i already have the latest BIOS and all drivers are up to date.

My RAM is 2GB.

Ok i will try to open the game later today and start taskmanager while ingame, haven't tried that.

I have no virusscanner installed because i only use that machine for gaming, nothing else. In fact the steam problems i had arose after i installed AVG (uninstall didn't help) (i should have know because it happened before, never combine AVG with steam). Also i didn't find a virus last time which is proof i keep my machine clean.

Eraserhead wrote:I have a MSI motherboard and went to the automatic update service page of MSI (it installs an IE browser addon that scans your hadware), it said i already have the latest BIOS and all drivers are up to date.

My RAM is 2GB.

Ok i will try to open the game later today and start taskmanager while ingame, haven't tried that.

I have no virusscanner installed because i only use that machine for gaming, nothing else. In fact the steam problems i had arose after i installed AVG (uninstall didn't help) (i should have know because it happened before, never combine AVG with steam). Also i didn't find a virus last time which is proof i keep my machine clean.

AVG, why? If you wanna go cheap at least instal Avast.
Anyway, if the problems came after installing AVG you migth wanna do a system restore to a point before that. That reminds me, need to uodate my backup!

Download some trial program like DriverBot or whatnot to figure out what drivers you have out of date. Once you figure that out, update them manually. (Saves paying for it.)

Do the ol' Run->"MSConfig->Startup and kill as many trashy Windows/peripheral background programs as you can. Do the same with Services if you're familiar with them.

Double check that you installed the correct driver for your graphics card, and consider installing a driver a little older than the most recent one. They are sometimes betas that have unintended side effects.

Lastly, make sure Steam didn't freak out and boost all of your graphics settings higher than what you usually run with. Anti-Aliasing and the like could have been turned way up accidentally.

I installed AVG while i had XP so it's not relevant now. this is a clean install of win7. I tried playing the game with Gamebooster, that proggie kills ALL unneccesary background processes possible so other processes are not the issue.

I think Hatters suggestion of using an older display driver is a good one, im gonna try that. I will also try setting a -dxlevel 80 as startup option.

Yes I was going to mention windows 7 supports direct x 10 as does your ati card. It's quite possible that by changing to the older direct x you should be doing much better.

Yesterday i decided to reinstall XP because i tried all possible drivers and setttings but the Ati Catalyst driver simply won't work under Win 7 for my display adapter.

It's running fine now again. Only have some irritating high ping because of my ISP is having troubles....