Counter strike Source lock up issue

[Servant]

Hey guys, I am a big fan of Counterstrike: Source. I have been playing the game for about 2 years now without any issues till now. I have tried playing the game on Windows Vista and Windows 7. It works fine but i get a lot of lag and low fps. I currently have Windows XP and am trying to play Source on it. My problem is that Counterstrike Source will lock up for about 2-3 minutes and then it goes back up after about 1 minute of waiting. This is very annoying while playing the game as it breaks the continuity. I do not wish to go back to Vista or windows 7 for reasons mentioned above regarding lag so please help me out. My system specifications are as follows, my CPU and processor are AMD Athlon XP, 1.84GHz. My video card is Nvidia Geforce 5 FX 5200 256 MB. I have 1 GB DDR and 266 SDRAM,1 by 1gb.

[Ninja-X]

Check whether you have updated your Windows or not. Also make sure not processes such as a firewall or anti virus are running in the background as they consume a lot of resources. Give how old your configuration sounds i would say your power supply is most probably failing you here. Your system might also be overheating and locking up leading to your problem. Check the temperatures of your system when you are putting in under stress or while playing the game. Try and see if this is just the case in case of Source or some other games too. If it is then it could be an indicator that something went wrong during the installation or some Windows XP update which is missing is doing this, considering you played this for 2 years but didn't mention on which of the 3 operating systems you did that, so updating your Windows looks like a good solution right about now.

[reddevil6]

Well i would suggest you to check whether the computer is overheating first. Your system is very old and it seems the hardware can't take the stress you are putting it under anymore. An upgrade of your system is definitely the need of the time in my opinion. You can also check for bad RAM, but provided you can find someone with some SDRAM to spare. That is a very remote possibility in today's times. My bet is that the game is taking the maximum out of your cpu and leading to this issue. Consider upgrading it as soon as possible.

[Hitman22]

Is steam downloading an update or something in the background? check for that because that could also lead to the issue. Steam running in the background also could be eating up resources with updates and things leading to maxing out your cpu. Considering how old your machine is, that really isn't a good thing. It is obviously why the game gets low fps and lag on Vista and Windows 7 too. Just a different way of showing that the computer needs to be upgraded if you want to continue playing those games. I had faced this issue because i had my anti virus running in the background which was leading to 100% cpu usage along with the game and lagging my computer.

[Mr. Boo Bear]

Download Everest which is a system diagnostics tool used to check the hardware of a computer. You can use it to check the temperatures before playing the game, possibly when the computer is idle and when you are playing it. While playing it when the game starts to lag or gets locked, minimize and run the tool and see what is the current temperature then. If your computer is indeed overheating then it could possibly because of dust and the fan not cooling properly the insides of your case. The problem in this case could also be the power supply which is not able to take the load. When a power supply is not qualified to take the load, like when you run the game and other applications then it will overload and compensate with such issues. Try playing in windowed mode and see what kind of result you get. Also go to your steam directory and delete "Clientregistry.blob" file and then restart Steam.

[robodude]

I had faced this issue on Windows7. I was running an auto configuration script. The game then would crash regularly and say that it was looking for a cause. You should download casey's configuration and see if it changes anything for you. In my case it made the game run amazingly well. The only limitation is that is caps the fps at 100. Also try running the game on DirectX 8. Casey's configuration will help in the cpu usage definitely. It will basically remove all the unnecessary things while running the game to make it work smoother. Also try and get Gamexp which helps a lot too while running resource intensive games. Good luck, hope this helps.