How to reduce lag with Sam and Max and Wallace and Gromit?

[Yellowtail]

Strong Bad was fine, but these 2 series have some massive lag problems. When I move to another area, often the game will freeze, sometimes for up to 5-10 minutes before I can continue the game. Obviously, this really hinders my progress and enjoyment of the games and I would really like to get this fixed as I have bought the etire W&G series and I would like to be able to play it properly. Even playing on the lowest graphics setting doesn't help!

[Leak]

Originally Posted by Yellowtail

Strong Bad was fine, but these 2 series have some massive lag problems. When I move to another area, often the game will freeze, sometimes for up to 5-10 minutes before I can continue the game.

Mind telling us your computer's specs? How much RAM do you have, what kind of hard drive/CPU/graphics card, etc.?

I'd hazard a guess that your computer is running out of memory and starting to swap - try running the games in a window and take a look at Task Manager when changing areas. If the value under "Performance > Physical Memory > Available" is close to zero you're out of memory; if that's not it take a look at the "Processes" tab, maybe some other program (virus scanner?) is eating a lot of CPU time...

(SBCG4AP used a lot less textures than those games and so used a lot less memory...)

np: Dakota Suite - One Day Without Harming You (The End Of Trying)

[Yellowtail]

Here are some specs.
256mb RAM
Graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
CPU AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1800+

I will try all the stuff you mentioned.

edit: When idle, (In WaGGA) the physichal memory available sat around 20,000 however when moving to another location (where most of the lag is experienced) it dropped to >5,000, even reaching as low as around 2,500.

[Leak]

Originally Posted by Yellowtail

Here are some specs.
256mb RAM
Graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
CPU AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1800+

I will try all the stuff you mentioned.

edit: When idle, (In WaGGA) the physichal memory available sat around 20,000 however when moving to another location (where most of the lag is experienced) it dropped to >5,000, even reaching as low as around 2,500.

Yep, there we have it.

256MB RAM is ultra tiny nowadays, and extra RAM is cheap - 1 GB (four times what you have) costs less than 10 EUR around here. Do yourself a favour and throw some extra RAM in there, it's the easiest way of giving your machine a speed boost (and not just for those games). Then again, your machine probably needs DDR SDRAM instead of DDR2 SDRAM (look into the manual) that's the norm these days, so it might cost more like 30EUR - but that's still rather cheap for an overall speed boost.

Replacing the graphics card would be the next thing to do, if the games are still too slow - or a new, cheap PC since that's probably cheaper than upgrading your machine.

np: Yello - Prisoner Of His Mind (Motion Picture)

[Will]

If the game is running slow, I would highly suggest turning the graphics quality and game resolution down. Like Leak said though, 256 ram isn't very much and is actually below the minimum specs for the game: "Memory: 512MB (1GB recommended)." There may be only so much you can do to improve performance.