[Rikaku]

Have you tried lowing the graphic setting in the game?
Turn off shadows in the game, turn off some of effects.
Someone i know had the same thing happen to her, it was happening when a brd did there buff.

[Lleo]

Had a similar problem. Tried everything I could think of (updating gfx-drivers, uninstalling installed software, changing ffxi settings), but ended up having to reinstall Windows.

[Santana]

Originally Posted by Lleo

Had a similar problem. Tried everything I could think of (updating gfx-drivers, uninstalling installed software, changing ffxi settings), but ended up having to reinstall Windows.

Ouch...

When I do, finally, get access to an HDMI monitor, I'm going to test it out and change the refresh rates to see if that helps. If not, I might be doing the same thing as you.

I'll post my solution in here.

[kai_samoht]

I'm kind of having the same problem.. When I first started playing FFXI on my new laptop it worked fine, and ran well with almost no lag. But now that I have so much random **** on it its lagging really bad whenever I, A (get in a big group of people), or B (someone casts a big magic spell like an AM or Fire 4). And it sucks cuz I am a RDM. So, it's come down to it and I'm just gonna go with re-installing Windows Vista onto my comp. (I got it on Christmas of 2007 BTW)

My laptop setup is this..
HP Pavillion dv9608nr
Vista 32 bit
4GB RAM
140GB HDD
Nvidia GeForce Go 7150m/nforce630 or whatever...

I only have about 45% memory left on my HDD, so I plan on backing everything up to external, and just re-install Vista, FFXI, and other things like Itunes and the Adobe CS4 Master Suite. Hopefully this will clean my comp up and leave me with more memory on my HDD, so I don't have to put so much back onto it. Also, this will hopefully solve my problem, if anyone has any idea's please help. LOL

[Santana]

Originally Posted by kai_samoht

I'm kind of having the same problem.. When I first started playing FFXI on my new laptop it worked fine, and ran well with almost no lag. But now that I have so much random **** on it its lagging really bad whenever I, A (get in a big group of people), or B (someone casts a big magic spell like an AM or Fire 4). And it sucks cuz I am a RDM. So, it's come down to it and I'm just gonna go with re-installing Windows Vista onto my comp. (I got it on Christmas of 2007 BTW)

My laptop setup is this..
HP Pavillion dv9608nr
Vista 32 bit
4GB RAM
140GB HDD
Nvidia GeForce Go 7150m/nforce630 or whatever...

I only have about 45% memory left on my HDD, so I plan on backing everything up to external, and just re-install Vista, FFXI, and other things like Itunes and the Adobe CS4 Master Suite. Hopefully this will clean my comp up and leave me with more memory on my HDD, so I don't have to put so much back onto it. Also, this will hopefully solve my problem, if anyone has any idea's please help. LOL

That's not my problem. Frame rate is fine, it's just this small skip every 30 frames or so.

[Kinder]

I had the same issue. By a process of elimination I worked out that it was my USB Wifi adapter that was causing the issue (linksys speedbooster). I removed it and used another USB wifi and bingo problem solved.

Hope this helps?

[Lunaryn]

Not surprising that it would be USB-related, FFXI's gotten a bit screwy with that of late...

As for the jumping occuring in notepad when switched away in SE's official windowed mode, that's actually normal; as far as I can tell FFXI retains the raw input interface and routes input to other programs itself, which causes i/o performance when switched away from FFXI to be really horrid. And it takes a while to figure out you've switched back and re-normalize input for FFXI. One of the reasons even the non-plugin-capable W6r Lite is preferred to official windowed mode by a number of people.

Reinstalling the OS is something worth considering, the registry tends to get cluttered in a number of ways over time and there's no real reliable way to clean it out aside from an OS reinstall. If you've had Windows installed on the machine more than 4 years (or more than 2 if you install a lot of software) you could probably use a reinstall.

IMO the easiest way is to buy yourself a hard drive upgrade, chances are you can get something a lot better than what was the norm 3-5 years ago easily enough, you can do a fresh install onto it, then you can hook the old hard drive up as secondary to transfer files.

[Etra]

I talked to SE about this problem this morning. They told me, "With all newer cards it is not supported to play the game. I have heard of these issues as well, but since that card is not supported, there is no fix for it."

That was his response to me saying that many people with GeForce 8 series cards have this problem.

Fun.

[Cometgreen]

I've been having a problem with FFXI skipping/stalling myself. It was running fine when, a week ago, the game started to randomly stall. The game stalls for maybe 3 seconds, and then my entire computer stalls (the cursor freezes, any music in background apps freeze, etc) for about 5 seconds, before returning to normal. The interval between stalls can be up to a minute or practically instantaneous. I was afraid it was a hardware problem, but I've run much more demanding games without any problems. I also tried the game with very low settings, both full screen and windowed, and the same problem.

I reinstalled FFXI, and then reinstalled Windows XP and FFXI. Still doing it. I had not installed any new hardware or drivers when it started. Someone mentioned defragging, which I'll do when I get home (I install the game on a separate HDD from my Windows HDD, and that was not reformatted). Any other ideas around here? I'm willing to replace hardware, but I want to figure out exactly what it is I need to replace, instead of rebuilding most of the computer.

My specs:

Windows XP SP2
MSI K9VGM-V AM2 VIA K8M890 mobo
Athlon X2 4000+ Brisbane 2.1 GHz
7600GT 256MB
2 GB DDR2 800 RAM
Antec NeoPower 550W

All of the above was bought in September 2007, and I don't use my comp to any extreme level. My harddrives are fairly old, though. One's I believe a 20GB Maxtor, the other an 80GB Seagate. IDE 100 I think.

[Etra]

Sort of found a fix. It fixed some of the skipping I have -- now it's not as bad, but it's still there.

Go to your network connections, right click on them and go to properties. Uncheck QoS Packet Scheduler (should also turn this off if you use a router.) You may also try unchecking File and Printer Sharing.

[Thalyn]

Originally Posted by Etra

Sort of found a fix. It fixed some of the skipping I have -- now it's not as bad, but it's still there.

Go to your network connections, right click on them and go to properties. Uncheck QoS Packet Scheduler (should also turn this off if you use a router.)

Yes, a friend I play this game with runs it on Vista and had this problem when we first started until they disabled the packet scheduler. Now the hitching is completely gone for them, but before that even the introduction movie had been skipping for them. I'm running XP and have never encountered this issue.

[Lunaryn]

Cometgreen: I'd suspect hardware here, but pinning it down would be tricky. That said, the inability to reproduce it in anything other than FFXI does make it more likely to be software-related.

A couple things you might try as diagnostic steps (not really likely fixes, but seeing if they have an impact could be helpful):
1) After you launch POL Viewer, open the Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del will do this on XP Home). Go to the Processes tab and find pol.exe. Right-click it and select Set Affinity. A dialog window will pop up and you should see two checkboxes checked marked CPU 0 and CPU 1. Uncheck CPU 1 and click OK. Close task manager and log into FFXI, see if it behaves any differently.
2) Ultimate Boot CD - Overview has a number of utilities available for checking hardware. In this case I'd focus primarily on hard drive diagnostics, particularly on the drive containing FFXI. The lockups described could be the result of a driver performing an atomic operation (one where interrupts are disabled) that's taking an abnormally long time.
3) FFXI-specific glitches often also occur in the Vana'diel Bench utilities as they use the same engine. Have you tried running Vana'diel Bench 3 and seeing if you can get the same problem?