So I reinstalled Oblivion after beating the game a while ago to try to play through more quests and enjoy a different class type. I have the exact same system as I had when I installed it before and it ran fine then, but now I am getting these random freezes. It seems like, just at odd times, not even when I am particularly busy in the game or during high stress periods, the game will be running perfectly smooth and then come to a complete hault for about 10 seconds, then snap out of it and be fine again. It does it more often during high stress periods (while fighting) but still does it even when I am just perusing my inventory. I have tried changing everything.

My System:
AMD Athlon 3200+ XP (Barton 2.2)
Sapphire Radeon x800GTO
1.5 gigs PC3200 RAM
MSI K7N Delta mobo
Enermax 460W PSU
SB Audigy 2 soundcard

I tried installing the new patch, that didn't help. I tried completely reinstalling the game, nothing. I have gone thru TweakGuides.com Oblivion guide (which is very good, btw http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html ) and changed some memory loading settings, etc. I don't know what this could be. What's the most troubling part is that the game runs very well, I have changed the settings to absolutely dismal and it still runs smooth and randomly freezes. Any solutions?

Hard disks suffer from a phenomenon called fragmentation. Over time especially when running an operating system like windows, files will get spread all over the drive in small pieces. This leads to long loading times as the reader head in the drive must look in 50 differant places on the platters to pick up all the pieces it needs to satisfy whatever application is asking for data.

In Morrowind, when you traveled around in the games world, you would be presented with a "Loading area" message along with a few second freeze in gameplay. This has been streamlined in oblivion to eliminate the freeze but if it cant load it fast enough you still may get some lag. What you might be experianceing is the consequences of a heavily fragmented drive. Since you obviously cant proceed into an area of the game it has yet to load, it has no choice but to lock you there untill the data has been loaded.

When you reinstalled the game into an allready fragmented drive, probably what happened is that the games data files got strewn out over the hundreds of tiny slivers of free space all over the drive.

Hit the start menu button down in the bottom left. Open up "All Programs" and navigate to "Acessories" then "System Tools". Fire up the "Disk Defragmenter". Analyze the drive then go anhead and defrag it. Its likely to take an hour or so (sometimes longer depending on how bad it is) so go do something else and come back when its done.

Lemme know how bad it was (should give you a % fragmented value) and if it makes a differance.

Sounds kinda like a program in the background.
I get some hard stutters running or galloping
my horse; but never in my inventory screen.
10 seconds is a long time.
If it ran fine before, then it's something
you've changed or a program you added since then.

Alright, well I dunno if defragging is going to help. I actually have 2 HD's in my box right now, one smaller one with winXP on it and Oblivion is installed on the other HD. I wonder if that would make a difference, although I highly doubt it because I have lots of games installed on the secondary HD. I actually defragged the secondary HD that I installed Oblivion on after installing it, but I'll run it on my OS HD now too. I usually keep my discs pretty clean so we'll see if this really fixes anything. I'll check back in and let you know.

edit: Oh also, my secondary HD was at about 3% fragmentation when I defragged it, my primary HD was actually up to about 14% which isn't good hehe. I'll see if this helps.

quote ccolgan

Alright, well I dunno if defragging is going to help. I actually have 2 HD's in my box right now, one smaller one with winXP on it and Oblivion is installed on the other HD. I wonder if that would make a difference, although I highly doubt it because I have lots of games installed on the secondary HD. I actually defragged the secondary HD that I installed Oblivion on after installing it, but I'll run it on my OS HD now too. I usually keep my discs pretty clean so we'll see if this really fixes anything. I'll check back in and let you know.

edit: Oh also, my secondary HD was at about 3% fragmentation when I defragged it, my primary HD was actually up to about 14% which isn't good hehe. I'll see if this helps.

Well I defragged my primary HD and it didn't change a thing. What puzzles me the most about this is that my game runs so smoothly otherwise. It just seems like every few minutes the game feels the need to catch up so it completely doesn't move (no mouse movement, no keyboard, nothing) and it needs about 5-10 seconds to catch up. I am still very puzzled, I have tried changing every kind of video setting imaginable. Any other suggestions? I wonder if it has something to do with Oblivion being on a seperate hard drive..

XP loads a ton of background crap that
you don't need.
Why don't you set unessential services
to manual rather than automatic?

i.e. page 2 of the tweakguide link you gave.
'optimization of windows not the game itself'
A seperate tweakguide.

for it to be doing this on an identical setup indicates that, whether you know it or not, something has changed since you reinstalled. Any driver changes in any of your hardware? running any new apps that could be doing this? Maybe ya caught a virus or worm thats taking priority for a few seconds every once in a while. Hell you could have just had a bad install. DVD drives are notoriously picky. The built-in data correction can only do so much and if it reads a damaged bit and guesses wrong, the resulting flawed installation can do some very strange things. Clean the disk and make sure its free of scratches and try installing again.

I had already tried most of these things. I have reinstalled the game, etc. I close down all my applications, I've looked into so many issues. I'm fairly computer literate, so I know what types of things would be causing this. The only things I've really done since I last installed the game is update my ATI drivers, that's about it. Maybe I should try the Omega drivers? Or is there any validity to the notion that i should install Oblivion on the same drive as my OS? It doesn't seem to matter with any other games. I have defragged, virus scanned, etc..the big thing is that no other games that I play (even high demand ones) have had any kind of problems like this. There is no other game that shows any hints of freezing in this manner, just Oblivion.

quote

the big thing is that no other games that I play (even high demand ones) have had any kind of problems like this. There is no other game that shows any hints of freezing in this manner, just Oblivion.

If the only thing you've done
is install new ati drivers the
answer seems obvious to me.
Just because they're newer
doesn't mean they're better.
It's painless to roll them back;
you lose nothing; you still have
the updated drivers on your hard drive.

Well the real thing that makes me wonder if it is or is not the graphics drivers is that the game doesn't seem to have any other problems, not really any studdering or smoothness issues, but rather that it just decides to freeze randomly.

Well I ran LavaSoft as a last ditch effort to see if maybe some spyware was the cuplrit, and it maybe...maybe has made a bit of difference. It still freezes but perhaps less often. I just don't remember the game doing it before, I am gonna install Omega drivers and see what it does.

Try the Omega drivers. I found that i got higher frame rates and games generally ran smoother. My accuracy on the Battlefield 2 server I play on went up by nearly 10% with them in just a couple weeks.

http://keepinyareal.com/bf2statistics/player.php?pid=60149858

One thing with the Omega drivers tho; if you use a DVI out to your TV or something, theres a checkbox somewhere in there that resets your video settings every restart. Uncheck it if you dont wanna have to reset them each time..