How often do you restart?

tuffluck

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my computer seems to lose about 2fps on average in games after being up for 48 hours or so; once i restart it's fine. i don't remember having this problem with xp. anyone experience this? is this normal?
 

tuffluck

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i didn't know people actually used sleep and hibernate. seems like it's the same thing as turning your PC off altogether.

as for me, i rarely turn off or restart my computer. i really don't think the idle power consumption is too significant. i compare my electricity bill to other friends that live alone in my city that don't have computers on 24/7 and the difference is negligible.

so if the restart clears the problem of having a couple of FPS drops, does that single out the problem being with any of the hardware?
 

isamuelson

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FPS can be finicky. It's really an average over time. Depending on how long you play the game for and other conditions (what's running, etc), a difference of +/- 2 fps is nothing to really be concerned about.

In fact, when you do a bench mark, you really should disable as many services (network, windows update, anti virus, etc) as possible and then, you run your benchmark at LEAST 3 times to get an average.

Have you tried running the game again later on (without rebooting) to see if it dropped another 2 or if it went back to the original or even increased? I really think you're grasping at straws here and are worrying over nothing.
 

tuffluck

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thanks for the detailed answer. well i am really more concerned with BF:BC2 as my computer is a bit older. i still run it fine, but an average of 45-46fps and an average of 42-43fps can cause some noticeable lags sometimes, just because the fps is low to begin with. 70fps and 75fps probably not as noticeable.

i won't worry with it...it's probably normal to have happen, and sometimes if i think it is lagging more than usual i will start 3dmark06 and just see what the opening fps are on the first test and if they seem 2-5fps lower i restart, which is probably just being paranoid.
 

Kewlx25

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I restart once per month when I install Windows Patches. Before Win7 was available at retail, there were few patches, so I had it run for almost 3 months before I finally rebooted.

I don't get degrading performance.
 
I normally use sleep which is almost like power off, except the current state is kept in ram. Hibernate is similar except the current state is written to the hard drive also. I do this because resume is only a few seconds compared to a reboot.

Some poorly written programs will have a virtual memory leak, and will, over time fill up the available ram. Rebooting will usually fix such problems.