Hey all, just recently started to buy a few games from GoG and I'm having some trouble consistently running them. My computer can handle up to Half-Life 2 and around that, so it shouldn't be that it can't "handle" these games, but something is messed up.
I've noticed in most the games I've tried so far, Shogo, Postal 2, and even Earthworm Jim, there's some "popping" noises off and on and it almost acts like the games are trying to minimize themselves for some reason, and just a few minutes in the games start to chug and nearly freeze.
I have recently gone through a reformat with this thing and there's honestly not anything really running in the background at all. My drivers are pretty fresh, though maybe I still need to mess with this, I'm not sure. I'm also on XP and I'm the only user on this laptop, so most games should be running in Administrator mode.
Anyone know if this is just a case with Latitude's or something? I know they're supposed to be more business oriented, but yeah. Any suggestions?

I've actually got the same laptop at work, and I haven't noticed any problems with the games that uses DOSBox. I've got the games you've mentioned here, so I could try them on Monday. I've got 2Gb RAM and Vista Business installed though.

How large a page file (virtual memory) do you have at the moment?

Hmm, don't know much about pagefiles honestly. I looked it up and ran dxdiag, I've got 4731mb available. I did manually put in two new 2GB sticks of ram a few months back. The weird thing about it though (maybe sheepdragon knows of this too), is that apparently because of the hardware only 3.5GB of ram can be used for max... it's weird.
My system properties is only telling me 3.25. Maybe this is somewhat of an issue?

it's actually the software.
xp is a 32 bit operating system and can only utilize around 3 gigs of ram. you need a 64 bit OS like xp pro, vista, or win7 to recognize more ram.

You may want to check your advanced audio options. Go to control panel--> sound and audio devices, Advanced on the speaker settings, performance tab and check to makesure your sample rate is best and that hardware acceleration is on full.

Or the exact opposite. Sometimes stuttering is caused by the settings being too high for what the hardware or software can handle.

I always thought Latitudes were strictly not for gaming, entertainment, and fun stuff, and the Quadro is the worst graphics card in the whole wide world. But the fact that you can actually run Half Life 2 on it seems to me like not a hardware issue, but a software/driver problem. I actually haven't read the whole thread, so someone probably has said that already.

Is it only on GOG games? It sounds like an issue with the PC or OS/drivers rather than GOG, as the games you list use different technology and don't have much in common.
Maybe try dxdiag tests if you haven't already... or try the benchmarks on yougamers.com or download 3dmark or some form of other benchmark.
Something that can comfortably run HL2 should be able to run shogo. Also, make sure to check the support/forums for each game if they have specific issues.

Whelp, it seems to be an issue with my PC I'm guessing, maybe ever since I recently reformatted it, it's still missing some updates or something. I just redownloaded Steam and HL2 to play it and it basically did the same thing just a few minutes into the game. I've gone through the game completely a few times in the past and it always ran pretty well, so something is up...
Even weirder that NVIDIA Smart Scan does not detect my system. It lists XP, but not XP Pro (which is what I have), so maybe that's why? But manually searching for drivers it'll direct me to this one, which doesn't support NVS 120m... and it won't work.
My card specifically is a 512mb Quadro NVS 120m, GeForce Go 7400.
The newest driver for it at Dell was from 2007 and I installed that one, it didn't seem to change anything though.
No idea what's up. I tried lowering my sound settings as suggested above (they were all at max), but it didn't seem to do much.
Well I manually replaced ram on this thing, maybe I can look into getting a better graphics card... then again I'm pretty fed up with this laptop in general thesedays, lol. I'd rather just continue to wait it out and get a good desktop PC. Still this is kind of annoying since I could run games pretty well in the past and there's a lot from GoG I'd love to play! Ugh.

XP is XP is XP, differences being insignificant to the driver. Listing Home, Pro, and Media Centre as different systems is just unnecessary and confusing.
Also, the Quadro and GeForce series are two different lines of cards, the former being made for "professional" graphics, and the latter for "gaming". Which one of them is it?

I guess it's the Quadro, since that's the actual "name" and listed under my display settings. dxdiag lists GeForce as the chip type though.
Either way I checked around nvidia's site for both drivers and neither work.

Neither work according to the pages, or neither worked when you tried to install them?
Either way, I managed to find [url=ftp://download.nvidia.com/Windows/Quadro_Certified/]Nvidia's ftp site[/url], you could try looking for a newer driver there, though you won't know which driver is compatible with your card as there are no text files with release notes.

Yeah, the file will finish unpacking then when nVidia Windows Software pops up I get:
"The nvidia setup program could not locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware"
So maybe I'll have to dig around the FTP for one that might work.

NVidia aren't great at supporting laptop drivers. I recommend you go to the dell support website and download all the latest versions of the drivers.
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&ServiceTag=&SystemID=LATITUDE%20D820&os=WW1&osl=en&catid=&impid=
It's possible that in the process of reinstalling xp you've lost/messed up some drivers.