[portillos]

I'm having a weird problem for 2 months now...getting desperate as it's become very very annoying. I would love to get some help on this!!!

Every time I host or join an xfire chat room (voice chat), I get hesitations or lags during COD4 online play. This is the only game I play. This problem does not exist when I do a direct voice call on xfire to one person! In other words, after having this problem for several weeks and trying different things, one day I tried this:

1) start xfire, call a friend (voice call), begin talking back and forth
2) start COD4, play. Result: No lag!
3) go to xfire, kill the voice call
4) start xfire chat room and invite friend into room.
5) go back into COD4. Result: Lag!!! this "lag" is a very consistent "hesitation" every 1 second or so. This is only when xfire chat rooms are started...whether it's one or two other people in the chat room doesn't matter - the lag is always there.

I'm using the following (tell me if you need to know more):

Dell Dimension E510
WinXP SP2
Netgear GA311 Network adapter
Pentium 4 3MHz single core with hyperthreading enabled
ATI x1950 Pro (pci express x16 port)
on-motherboard sound (using headset jacks on front panel)
Cable modem - speeds tested, very good
no router
3G ram (4 slots on E510: 2 slots have 512MB, 2 slots have 1GB cards. I'm confident they are installed correctly).

I've tried the following:
was using router before...so I removed router, only use cable modem now, problem remained
Was using on-motherboard network adapter, switched to NIC card, (and disabled on-board NIC in setup), no improvement
disabled several of the high quality COD4 video and audio settings to low quality or low resolution, no improvement

When I was using the router, I hooked up a laptop through another router port to handle xfire chat, and ran the game on my main computer, and this got rid of the lag problem. But that's a hassle and I don't want to set that up every time!

Could it be the on-board sound? Should I buy a separate sound card? My friend uses his on-board sound and doesn't have this problem.
Could it be the voice settings on the control panel? Some sort of cpu sharing problem? Memory problem?

Please help.

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make sure in game voice chat is disabled. Other than that, you will need to contact xfire support.

[starjax]

make sure in game voice chat is disabled. Other than that, you will need to contact xfire support.

[portillos]

Thanks for the reply. I had done this already to no avail.

I also posted this to an xfire forum but no help there yet.

Since I don't know if this is fixable through the xfire program, I posted here thinking someone could tell me how to troubleshoot through my pc's settings. I don't know if there's some way to limit the CPU usage on a program or something like that.

[starjax]

xfire is known to have some compatibility issues. Have you patched cod4 to version 1.6?

[portillos]

Yes, I did this the other night. I've had this lag issue before and after the patch.

I went ahead and installed the separate sound card and disabled the integrated sound. I also found a microsoft utility (http://technet.micro...s/bb896653.aspx) called process explorer that helps explain all the processes running in the background. I'm hoping that by disabling the things I don't need, playing with the xfire bandwidth / cpu usage option and using a sound card, something will improve. I should know later tonight when I play again.

Thanks for the help so far...I'm not getting any responses to my post on the xfire forum. If you have any other ideas please let me know!

By the way does it seem like I should be having this problem, given my setup:

3GHz Pentium 4 with HT
ATI Radeon x1950 Pro
XP SP2
3G RAM (2 slots 512MB, 2 slots 1G)

?? I am guessing this should be plenty to handle COD4 + xfire chat room