Random oddities

Something odd is happening.

Been wondering Moria for a while now. Ventured into the Waterworks recently and started the quests there. Going careful and it's reasonably OK. Tonight is another matter though, no changes to character setup and three times had this odd freeze then suddenly I'm at 100 or 200 Morale and then back at the stone circle. Game doesn't appear laggy, once retreated Fafnir then stands with his arms outstretched.
Had this once before in Eregion with the Angmarim Smith quest. I went into combat stance but there was no enemy, looked around for ages and nothing attacked. Moved forward and spotted the Smith, targetted him and got the freeze then hardly any morale.

I'm also getting random crashes, not often and usually after a couple of hours play. I may do a re-install - but that will take soooo long.

Anyone else had this?

I have had and stil have sometimes plenty of connection problems lately. This is most annoying when it happens in fighting, I continue to auto attack, but can't use any skills. My screen also sometimes freezes, but game keeps running behind. And ofcourse there are crashes but nothing new there. I have been trying to figure out where my prroblem is and been reading lots of CM forums with people complaining of similar problems.... I shall see if they continue to happen I might start by upgrading my PC as it starts to be bit obsolete...

I've not included the retreats I had fighting the monsters with the really bad armour debuffs here. Scared me to death the first time I encountered them - I did see my morale rapidly drop with the hits with these.

I suspect my problem is partly to do with the hitches many people are reporting and ir does seem to be worse after the last update. I've seen some graphics ammendments that I may try - although the game seems to perform OK otherwise.

I had similar problems, then was told to reduce the graphic settings. I reduced it down by 2 notches in the end to high, and it's been absolutely fine ever since. They started as soon as I entered Moria, and no where else.

Some suggestions are below, appologies if it's something obvious to you. Hope it helps.

What I think is happening (with my issue at least) is there's a lot of characters in the same zone (Moria) all loading textures into your graphic card memory. Higher texture resolution means the game has to swap it in and out of graphical memory more often, resulting in "graphical lag".

Reducing the texture resolution or quality may prevent this from happening. Although I have simply reduced my overall graphic settings from the maximum to high.

I'm uncertain as to how relevant this next bit is, but another possibility is with the page file. Any application in XP or Vista has a maximum of 2gb it can use within the page file, regardless of how big the page file actually is.

Quite often Windows will search for contiguous page file space, and hence when this starts to become less available Windows has to seach around a multi gigabyte file.

A way to alleviate this is to increase the page file above the size Windows will actually use. This doesn't give applications or Windows any more page file, but allows it to find bigger chunks of unallocated page file easier. The result is Windows spends less time trawling the page file for free space.

My page file is 8gb on my Vista system, even though it only needs about 3gb. But it does stop the annoying freeze after a playing for a while.

Again on the page file, always make sure your page file has the minimum size set to the recommended (or slightly higher). This will stop Windows resizing the paging file on the fly and increase system response.

If you have a second disk, move the page file to the disk that does not have Windows installed. This will reduce the bottle neck on the disk and interface hardware.