I rarely use my PC for games, mostly because it can’t handle any of the current ones. It’s an aging 1.8ghz P4 with 768mb of RDram (Rambus! Remember that?). The video card is an ancient Geforce 2.
I recently got hooked on the demo of this game Rise of Legends and bought it today when I saw that it was on sale, cheap. It actually runs fine!
But after I’m done playing and exit out of the game, the computer runs kind of goofy. It seems slower, and things like menus pop up slower and freeze for a few songs. Opening folders (especially if they’re full of a ton of files) feels laggier, and opening webpages seem to hang for a second.
What’s going on? I can’t think of anything that the game is doing that should cause this sort of lingering behavior.
I don’t know what causes it, but my computer does it too, sometimes. I’ve always assumed that the game is tying up RAM even after you’ve exited, for some reason. Doing a Restart always fixes it.
Does this behaviour exist forever after the game ends, or does it only last a relatively short period of time? Also, is your memory close to the minimum/recommended amount for the game?
My guess, under the assumption that the slowdown occurs for a short period, is that the game is using up all available memory in your system. What Windows can do is use your hard drive as extra memory. When you play the game for a while, the rest of your programs will have their memory contents saved to disk and then Windows will give the memory to your game. When you exit the game and try to use your other programs again, Windows will have to restore the contents of memory from disk, which takes time. Once the memory is restored, your programs should run at normal speed. Keep in mind that the memory is restored as you use it, instead of in one big chunk at a time – so you might see slowdowns happen several times as you try to use different programs, or even do different things in the same program.
Games are often buggy when first released. Have you installed the latest updates? Googling turns up some references to a built-in autopatcher. Running it might help.
Also, after closing the game, look on the Processes tab of Task Manager and see if any of the game’s processes are still running in the background. If so, select them and hit End Process.