I can,t belive this i was playing on Rome total war with great peformance and i turned off my computer. When i turned it back on my computer has slowed down big time this has never happened before i have unistalled many programs defragemented it you name it to increase peformance. Where has my peformance gone i have 52.36 GB free for god sake i ned help quick

Before you open the game again, push Ctrl+Alt+Del, and find any unnescessary programs which you can close. If you're on XP, than in the [Process list] you should be able to tell which programs are important or not by looking at what it says in the 'User Name' list. If it says anything other than 'System' or 'something Service' than I close it if it takes up too much memory.

Why do you turn off your computer while in-game?..

What mostly works for me is that you clean C:\Windows\Temp
and remove everything under Start -> All Programs -> Startup

Good luck

When you turn off your computer while you have processes running the information is stored in your virtual memory cache. Make sure all programs have been shut down next time and do what Delta-Omega said to do. How many games do you have installed?

if its a dell, go into your bios(f2 on startup), and find an option that says 'IDE harddrive acoustics', and change it to performance. that will increase your data rate, and get you better frame rate.

Only do this if you know what your doing though. Because if you don't, you'll cause more problems.

yes, if your harddrive is nearing capacity it will make things slower, i learned that the hard way,

52 gigs is hopefully still lots of room though...