Why is this PC going slow?

2GB RAM

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Buy larger ram sticks - that not enough to run modern games with.

Well, as I mentioned earlier, you could be experiencing driver issues with Morrowind since Direct3D8 is rather old. I ran some old D3D8 code from one of my old programming books, and it ran at 20fps (WDDM 2.0 appears to break many old DirectX games in terms of speed). Keep in mind that NV and other major vendors aren't actively checking their drivers against really old versions of DirectX. If you want another example, I tried running Zulu Assault (a 2D game using DirectDraw5) on Win8 and even Win10. Result? 6fps tops ingame.

How many other games have you tried? How many other games do you own? Have you tried running some gfx coding samples, like, let's say, the NVIDIA SDK? It could be those specific games. I want to know what else you tried.

Shogun.

Then I think it's a driver related issue. The drivers are probably breaking your game(s), except for the more demanding ones that require more RAM. Does San Andreas give you visible bugs and other garbage when stencil shadows are on?

Another story for you. When WinXP x64 came out, the drivers for my GeForce 6600 were pretty bad. Halo ran at 5fps even though I had a good PC, and other games I had were either too slow, or broken visually. Sometimes you can't blame the PC entirely. If you have a PC that can handle it, it's safe to assume you have driver issues.

As for Morrowind, try reading this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/1ag2o2/help_getting_horrible_fps_around_20ish_on_very/

Shogun.

Alright. *cracks fingers*

The Processor core is pretty outdated. and I recommend an update soon. The GPU will be outrunning the processor which means that the processor is a bottle neck. Because you are using an AMD rig you can upgrade to a new AMD processor. But unfortunately I have no idea what type your board supports. AM3 socket is backwards compatible with AM2 processor. But AM3 processor can not fit in an AM2 socket. So... unless you know what you can support. You're pretty much SOL in that department.

Morrowind is bound to run like crap right now. It's not designed to take advantage of current hardware. So try running it with "Open Morrowind"

I kinda expected GTA V to not run very well on that system. Battlefield on Ultra with that same graphics card and a stronger processor can only produce 24FPS on average.

With GTAV being more graphically involved... I'd imagine it'd be a pain to get that thing to run on minimum specifications.

You can upgrade the graphics card... but your CPU is still the problem.

And as for your RAM... an upgrade can go a long ways for you. Not sure how far though. But with AMD you always want to have a number of ram sticks installed that's divisible by two.

It's something to do with the way AMD optimizes it's RAM use for speed or something. So... 2 sticks. 4 sticks. ect.

A good minimum for the amount of ram you need is probably 6. But I'd shoot for 8. That's two 4gig sticks. Not one 8gig

2GB RAM

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Buy larger ram sticks - that not enough to run Windows 10 with.

Methinks you missed the "Morrowind" part of it.

I mean, I can understand GTA IV running slow, since it's not optimized for sh*t, but Morrowind?

Come on, Morrowind shouldn't be having any problem.

There, i fixed this for you...

Running an operating system that consumes considerable CPU doing things like live speech recognition and that per se needs 2GB to accomodate itself on a computer with an elderly CPU and 2GB of RAM...

it's surprising that it runs so well!

Being able to play a game like Morrowind (and even more so GTA) at all in these conditions is pretty awesome. Kudos to the developers of Morrowind and GTA.

One more RAM stick of 2 GB would do wonders.. and it should be like $20..

Can be a bad idea to mix different types of RAM though so if you can't find one matching the original or if it's more expensive it's probably better and perhaps cheaper to buy two new ones or a single 4 GB.

EDIT: Also, install Windows XP.. that PC is older than Vista..

Imo and experience, Windows 10 is slower than Windows 8.1 , if won't have XP better have Windows 8.1 ( with Defender and unnecessary services disabled )

install Windows XP.

Might as well paint a big target on your back and shout "hack me" from the rooftop, giving out your ip address on 4chan...

It should be fine with Windows 10 or 8.1, so long as you have at least 4gb of ram, preferably 6 or 8...

Running an operating system that consumes considerable CPU doing things like live speech recognition and that per se needs 2GB to accomodate itself on a computer with an elderly CPU and 2GB of RAM...

it's surprising that it runs so well!

Being able to play a game like Morrowind (and even more so GTA) at all in these conditions is pretty awesome. Kudos to the developers of Morrowind and GTA.

No it's not, newever os run older hardware just fine in most cases, it's not like it's doing any of those things WHILE morrowind is running.

Might as well paint a big target on your back and shout "hack me" from the rooftop, giving out your ip address on 4chan...

Haha well.. doubtful.

Surely if he uses an old IE to visit dubious sites or download torrents.. (in which case that is probably the major slowdown reason in the first place).

Though I'm sure there are people still looking for XP computers to hack it's not like you just get hacked automatically.. unless you're incredibly careless. Most ISPs block ports that often get hacked if you refer to that type of threats. If you're smart and disable the services you don't need there's pretty much no way to get hacked on XP. Most of the vulnerabilities were in like ActiveX and stuff that aren't even used anymore in anything that you would likely need or want.

Also XP has received security updates until quite recently (and still do for some versions), so there are definitely not any auto-hacks that just work on every XP computer unless you browse with an old IE.

I got a 2001 PC with XP that runs just fine (and that I used to play Morrowind on).

For the slowdown in general, if the HDD hasn't been formatted for a while it is probably a good idea to do that and a clean reinstall (and if the HDD is from 2007 might be good to try to find a cheap upgrade).

(If you expect to actually run a lot of 2015 dated stuff on your computer you can ignore my post, but if you want software that is actually meant to support that hardware work correctly it's probably better to run that software as it was meant to be run).

install Windows XP.

Might as well paint a big target on your back and shout "hack me" from the rooftop, giving out your ip address on 4chan...

I don't think you quite understand how this whole hacking thing works...

Might as well paint a big target on your back and shout "hack me" from the rooftop, giving out your ip address on 4chan...

How would you even reach that computer? Every router that I've had during the last decade was configured to drop incoming traffic by default.

Sure, if you host some Internet Exploder 6 specific exploits on your website, you might succeed, but nobody who can help it is using Exploder anyway (even my father who is an old man, and who by the way uses Windows XP, understands that).

- CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ (2 CPUs), ~2.6GHz
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750
- 2GB RAM
- OS: Windows 10

That is an extremely old CPU (2008), with a very low amount of RAM (2GB) for this era, on a brand new OS that requires at least 4 GB to run well (and that may not run well the older games), paired with an extremely recent GPU.
The GPU is probably not being able to run at its full potential either as it must be running in PCIe 1.6 mode (we're at 3.0 now).

GPU-bottlenecked games will run smoothly (e.g. Crysis games). CPU-bottlenecked games will run like crap (e.g. All Skyrim games, most RTS games). Assassin's Creed I & II should run well on that machine.
Optimized DX12 titles should make a better usage of the CPU which will help, but AFAIK there aren't DX12 games yet; and they will all be aiming to using +4GB of RAM.

Since the system is old, make sure the heat dissipation vents aren't clogged. I wouldn't be surprised if there a thick layer of dust between the heat sink and the fan, thus causing thermal throttling.

One more last thing: That CPU model was affected by the QPC timer bug, which can cause frame stutter and other insane performance inconsistencies in games. The OS must be forced to use the PM Timer to workaround it. In Windows XP you had to edit the boot.ini file and add "/USEPMTIMER". AFAIK on Windows 7 and above, you have to use bcedit.

I also advise to disable Cool 'n Quiet from the BIOS to check if that improves performance.

3. HP doesn't make the best of gaming PCs in general.

The brand has nothing to do, except in terms of the kind of PSUs they use and heat dissipation practices.

Morrowind is bound to run like crap right now. It's not designed to take advantage of current hardware.

I'm really surprised that you're the only one besides myself that came to this conclusion, and quickly.

You can upgrade the graphics card... but your CPU is still the problem.

I was going to disagree, but looking at the system requirements for GTA V, that's actually a major part of his problem for that game specifically. It states that you need a Quad Core eqivalent. The speed of his CPU is enough, but he doesn't have the recommended number of cores. Also, the minimum amount of ram needed is double what he has. I think that would explain it.

I don't believe his CPU is his primary limiting factor for all of his games though. To be fair, I have an old Mac Pro 1,1 from 2006. It's running an Xeon X5130 @ 2Ghz (two separate dies, both with dual cores), 21GB ram, with a GTX 760, and it runs pretty much everything I throw at it with full speed. Can't guarantee it will run GTA V properly (I don't have any interest in that game or anything Rockstar makes except Max Payne). I can upgrade to 2 X5350s for 8 cores at 3Ghz later on, just haven't gotten around to it yet.

The brand has nothing to do, except in terms of the kind of PSUs they use and heat dissipation practices.

My experience tells me otherwise. Back when they were still around, I noticed Compaq computers had significantly worse performance than Dell PCs of similar hardware. My Dell B1000r continues to outperform any Compaq computer I've ever had or used to this day.

Shogun.

For GTA IV, quad core is a must. Pretty sure that if you had a dual core you couldn't run it at acceptable framerate, lurked a lot on GTA IV forums at the time.

Played it on an overclocked Core 2 Duo with a GTX 560 Ti, severely CPU bottlenecked, got around 30 fps. Upgraded to an i5 2500 and bam, framerate skyrocketed.

I mean, I can understand GTA IV running slow, since it's not optimized for sh*t, but Morrowind?

Morrowind, optimized?

But yes, despite Morrowind's poor coding, it should run fine on those hardware.

The problem is, the older the game, often time the slower it runs. They either run too fast, and you have to do crazy stuff to artificially slow down the game (Deus Ex plz?), or they run really slow, because now they're running via twenty layers of software abstraction.

Still... have you tried just right clicking on Morrowind's executable, running it as WinXP Servicepack 2, in admin mode? Sometimes that genuinely helps.

Also, Morrowind's a really popular game (and a really awesome game. But also really buggy and definitely not optimized). Have you tried googling something like "Running Morrowind in Win10 / Win8.1"?

Why are you so confused?

Windows 10 isn't designed to run on just 2GB of RAM, hell even Windows 7 can barely run on that!

Upgrade your RAM, that will help. RAm is fairly inexpensive and you'll probably gain a considerable increase in performance just by adding two more gigs.

Downgrade to an earlier version of Windows, that will help.

And as always, make sure your drivers are up to date. The GTX 750 also isn't the greatest card in the world and is probably also a contributor. Yes, you're running older games on it and it should be just fine, but because you're running Windows 10 on just two gigs of RAM it will slow everything down.

So, to sum up.

Buy RAM (inexpensive and available from Newegg, Tiger Direct, or even Best Buy)
Downgrade WIndows 10 to Windows 7
Check drivers

Windows 10 isn't designed to run on just 2GB of RAM, hell even Windows 7 can barely run on that!

The minimum specs for Win10 are 1GB for 32bit machines, and 2GB for 64 bit machines. Yes, minimum means it'll chug along slowly, and you may need to disable some background processes and micro-manage your installs a bit more.

Win7 ran decently well on 2GB of RAM. I used Win7 32bit + 2GB (and later 3GB) + weaker GPU (AMD 4760 + stock CPU (an AMD dual-core), from launch of Win7 until just last December, when I finally got new hardware.

It served me well as a development machine, and as a gaming machine. Certainly I couldn't play the very latest games, but it was fully usable for my needs. The biggest killer was compile times, but I don't agree with the "Unless you drive a Ferrari like me, you don't have a real car!" mentality that some people apply to their computer hardware.

Yes, better computers are better, but that's not always an option. That doesn't automatically mean that older computers don't work.