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Lag during gaming

jenn221

jenn221

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 4, 2007
43
0
Louisiana
I am more familiar with Macs than with PC's because it's what I have always known. However, I am not good when it comes to computer "lingo." I'm not exactly sure what RAM is, or what it does, or how it relates to speed, space on my hard drive, etc... So please help me keeping that in mind :)

So I have an 14" iBook G4, it's about 3 years old. I play World of Warcraft a lot. I don't usually have a problem with game lag, but I recently tried using Skype along with it so I can talk to the people I'm playing with. But whenever I do, the game lags out too badly to continue running Skype. Since I don't have a very large knowledge of the innerworkings of my computer, I'm wondering if there is any way for me to fix this problem....:confused:

I would appreciate any help anyone can give me! Thanks!

Jenn
 
If you have iBook G4, it's about 3 years old. I think it time to upgrade or just deal with it
 
Well I'd like to do that soon, but it isn't going to be an option financially for a little while. Is there anything that can be done in the meantime? Something I can add to my computer, or a program I can run to clean things up?
 
jenn221 said:
Well I'd like to do that soon, but it isn't going to be an option financially for a little while. Is there anything that can be done in the meantime? Something I can add to my computer, or a program I can run to clean things up?
Click to expand...

How much ram do you have installed and what iBook do you have?
 
It's nothing to do with your machine. Skype is using too much of your internet bandwidth for WoW to get data to and from the server. Either get a faster (both up and down) connection of quite Skype when playing. It may not be an absolute speed issue with your connection, but latency and Skype is just showing it up...
 
Reflow said:
How much ram do you have installed and what iBook do you have?
Click to expand...

under "about this mac" it says 640 MB DDR SDRAM.

I'm not sure what kind other than iBook G4.

robbieduncan said:
It's nothing to do with your machine. Skype is using too much of your internet bandwidth for WoW to get data to and from the server. Either get a faster (both up and down) connection of quite Skype when playing. It may not be an absolute speed issue with your connection, but latency and Skype is just showing it up...
Click to expand...

To get a faster connection, would that just mean upgrading the internet service that I have?
 
jenn221 said:
ummm.... I forget. :eek: How would I check that?
Click to expand...

There's no direct way of asking your Mac. You might be able to find out from your router, but every router is different. An online speed test (Google for one) would give an indication but that's not reliable...
 
Well one test told me 3.2-3.5 MB per second.

Another said 2978.1 Kbps.... those seem like very different results, right??

I'm sorry if I sound like an idiot, I just haven't found an understanding for this technical computer stuff yet. My dad tries to explain it to me all the time, and it sinks in only a little bit at a time.
 
They're around the same. 2978.1 Kbps is more or less 3Mb/s. What was the upload speed? That may be much more important. If you have Skype running what does Activity Monitor say your network usage is?
 
Ok, so while making a test call in Skype, and with the activity monitor open, my data sent/sec anf data recieved/sec varied between 5 KBps and 10 KBps.... that sounds much higher than what I just told you before.... Am I looking at the right thing in my activity monitor? When I just have Skype running but am not on the phone, it sits at zero Bytes.
 
Sounds very low. That would be having very little effect on the overall connection.

I'm not sure what else to suggest though. If you quite Skype and it runs fine then that it's clearly causing the problem...
 
Well I appreciate you trying to help. I just know that lots of people run Skype with WoW and don't have a problem.... or at least not as much as I do. If anyone else reads this and has some suggestions or answers as to why it's a problem for me, I'd appreciate it.

For now I'll just continue running WoW and Skype seperatly, until I upgrade my computer or internet and then I'll try again!
 
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