Alternates between smooth gameplay and choppiness. Why?

Well before I say anything here's my specs:

Pentium4 2.8 GHz
128 MB GeForce FX 5650
512 RAM

Well i run the game on medium (and sometimes low) setting and the gameplay is very smooth.

However at random intervals, the game starts to become choppy and jerky, and everything is a tad blurry and slow ( the FPS is decreased basically).

After about 2 minutes, the gameplay returns to its normal great graphics and smoothness again. then after a period of time, it goes back to choppy.

I have always turned off all background processes during my usage of the computer, as well as turning off system restore, and the game still plays in the manner.

I suspect it might have something to do with svchost.exe and explorer.exe, as whenever the game starts to become choppy, the computer makes that wierding cycling noise, indicating extra-busy activity is going on.
During this time explorer.exe and NBALIVE.exe has their memory usage go up through the roof.

what exactly seems to be the problem?

I have a secondary issue where some functions like activating a cable connection or browsing "My Computer" is impossible when I first start-up. I have to wait about 1.5 minutes before I can do so. During this time, all process in task manager do not have a user name (e.g explorer.exe is normally has a user of "System" but in this case it is blank, until after 1 min)

Could this be related to the issue at hand?

thanks for the long read

By the way, I forget to add:

I used to have an original version of NBA 2005, and it ran well, until about 4 months ago, when 2006 was first released.

Whenever I play 2005, it suffered the same problem as 2006. this shows that my original version of 2006 is not corrupt, for those who are wondering. thanks again for any help.

I can't fix your problem, but I can give you ideas on how to trouble shoot it.

Go into your task manager and right click nbalive06, select priority->high and play a game. See if it still slows down. If it does, try disabling your internet connection before you play the game. If it still has a slowdown, it could be possible that your cpu/videocard is getting hot wihle you are playing and that cycling may be your fan speed increasing to try and cool the chip/card down. I had a Geforce Ti4200 where the fan broke, but I had a case fan right under it the sucked hot air from under the card and expelled it out the case, my videocard temerature was in the 60s celsius when idle, and went to 80 degrees celsius when playing half life 2. It was still playable, but every now and then it would get really slow and the screen would become incredibly corrupt.

Make sure anti-virus scanning is disabled while your playing the game.

You may have adware, malware, spyware, or a virus that hasn't been detected.
Download and run AdAware to get rid of most adware/malware/spyware. If you have a anti-virus program, do an online scan. Sometimes one anti-virus program doesn't detect viruses that others do. Spybot can can get rid of some malware, too.

Run scandisk and defrag your hard drive.

Increase your virtual memory.

Try ending the explorer.exe process, then play live.

I've had the slow cable startup before(2 years ago), I don't know what it was. It may have been the computer or the network card.

Here's a little quote from a page on computing.net

http://www.techspot.com/tweaks/winxp_services/services-3.shtml
http://www.techspot.com/tweaks/winxp_se ... ndex.shtml
http://www.techspot.com/tweaks/wfp/index.shtml

If your system hangs about 2 or 3 minutes at startup, where you can't access the Start button or the Taskbar, it may be due to one specific service (Background Intelligent Transfer) running in the background. Microsoft put out a patch for this but it didn't work for me. Here's what you do:

Click on Start, Control Panel, Administrative Tools then Services.
Go to the 'Services' tab, find the 'Background Intelligent Transfer' service.
Disable it, apply the changes & reboot.

Or if you don't want to disable it .

Background Intelligent Transfer Service. Uses idle network bandwidth to transfer data. For the majority of Users this feature should be of little use & as such I?d recommend setting it to Manual. Those on highly active Networks may benefit from having this set to Automatic, although it may be worth testing out to see if it does.

I hope you fix your problem. Searching Computing.net has fixed a countless number of problems I've had.

Man awesome tips, Pdub.
That fixed my problem AT ALL!!! (i hope that his too)
Thx.