Computer "revving up" when logged on

Hello all,

I'm not sure I'd call this a MAJOR issue, but when I log onto the game, my computer "revs up" and gets rather loud... staying this way the duration of my time on the game. When I log off, the sound resumes to "normal".

I only ask because last night on a team, somebody else mentions that theirs does this as well. I've only noticed this with the advent of Issue 16.

Just wondering if anybody else has noticed a change in the sound of their system. If so, then I don't worry about it too much... perhaps that's just the way it's going to be.

If not, then perhaps I need to have my computer looked at.

Thanks for any help.

In case it matters, I have a Quad core.

Edit to add: Not too long ago, I got some type of message regarding a lack of virtual memory... and again, it was while I was playing the game. Now that I think about it... this "revving" up symptom coincided with that message.

After that message, I did an error check and defragged... just because that's something I usually do when I get those types of messages. LOL! I'm very computer illiterate.

That's normal. Most computer's fans (especially the video card fan which I suspect is the main source of the noise) are temperature sensitive these days.

When there's more heat being produced, such as when you're taxing your system playing a game, they rev up to full speed. When the system is idle, they slow down since they don't need to move as much air.

As long as it sounds like normal fan whirrrrr type noise, you're good. If it sounds like a grinding noise or something to that effect, it means one of your fans is probably starting to go.

EDIT: You might want to pop your case open and check the dust situation inside. Over time, heatsinks get clogged causing the fans to have to work harder. Things just might need a good cleaning out with a can of compressed air.

Okay, how much memory does your machine actually have?
And how big are your swap/paging files?
AND, how much free space is on the hard drive where the swap/paging files are?

If it's not fan noise, what you're hearing are the hard drives working overtime.

If you're low on physical memory, the machine has to swap to disk more often. As pulling data off platters (not out of the buffer cache) of hard drives are on the order of one thousand times slower than RAM access, this is not desirable from a performance standpoint.

And, if your swap space is too small, or you're running low on disk space (to the point where your paging file can't expand enough without filling the drive up completely), you're going to see the machine throwing errors like this at you and trying to shuffle data furiously back and forth between RAM and HD while the CPU tries to process as quickly as possible.

This kind of state isn't always a good thing as being constantly asked for maximum throughput tends to shorten the life of components like hard drives.

FWIW, I've seen City of Heroes consume 1.5GB of RAM with paging files peaking at 6-8GB (luckily I have a system with 8GB of RAM and terabyte disks, so I'm still good for a while).

If you can get back to me with this info, and possibly your system specs, I can suggest some strategies to help you out.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Frost and Hyperstrike,

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond.

I'll take a look at the dust situation. I have a case that has a large side fan, a fairly large top fan, and two or three fans in the front. It won't hurt to use some compressed air in the case and see if I can clean things up a bit.

Hyper, I'm at work, but from memory, I think I have a bit over 2 GB...or possibly over 3 GB of RAM. I wanted more, but since I'm running XP on my system, I couldn't get much more. With regards to page file, I looked at that today and it's a bit over 2 GB. Should I somehow increase that (I think I do that through Control Panel > System, yes?) Regarding the extra space on my C drive (where I believe the page file is), I can't remember off-hand, but it's not skimpy. I only store my applications there.

I know this isn't much help and when I get home this evening, I'll come back here and report more accurately.

How do I go about finding my RAM? I told you I'm quite computer illiterate.

I've been toying with the idea of biting the bullet and grabbing Vista, but now I'm more inclined to just wait for Windows 7.

This way I can hope to get more RAM.

It's not the case fans that would be winding up and causing the noise. It would be the fan on the video card or the fan on the processor or both. Those are the ones that are most important to clean out along with the area around the fan.

And with that amount of RAM it's not your drive working overtime.