[Ronn_Bman]

I don't think many here have experienced the dreaded "stutter", but according to the posts on the Bioware boards, it's fairly widespread. I posted this there, but that didn't get it completely "out of my system", so I thought I'd vent here, too.....

Anyone notice an increased stutter after defragmenting? Actually, I use Norton's Speed Disc, and afterwards, the stutter becomes exaggerated. Over time, the stutter smooths out, but immediately after a defrag it's really bad. My friend also noticed this after I mentioned it.

Now for my main point. I upgraded my audio driver yesterday, and the game started stuttering worse than ever. I went back to the old driver, but this didn't solve it. I wasn't completely surprised though because I've seen this before when I bought my new graphics card and went through several drivers.

Changes to drivers always seem to cause problems like this, even when I reverted to the original driver. I can usually fix this by uninstalling the game, defragmenting, and then reinstalling, but not this time.

The game was running pretty smooth for the last week or so, since I'd done a fresh install and stopped defragging, but now it's worst than ever, and I'm completely back to my original configuration.

What could possible cause a fresh install, on a newly defragmented hard drive, with the same drivers to run worse than before?

This stutter problem is driving me crazy. So far, I've put over $300 into my $1600 machine to play a game that costs $60. Worse still, now I'm afraid to try and update anything or even defragment because it might take my "acceptable" stutter and make it unacceptable.

I love this game, but last night I just couldn't bring myself to play. The skipping made me too angry... [img]graemlins/madhell.gif[/img]