Strange Performance Issue - Hard Drive Access Speeds up game?

[forelis]

Hi folks,

Ok, so I'm playing on p1999, and I have a desktop that works great. However, my Gateway laptop struggles mightily. I get slowdowns that look exactly like what people describe as the dual core issue. The game runs at half speed most of the time, then suddenly behaves normally, and then goes back to slow. I went through ALL of the steps in the dual core thread - and even went further and just straightup disabled the second core on my Intel CPU. No improvement. However, I noticed that when the client lurches forward and I get good performance, it is also EXACTLY when the hard drive is being accessed. So, I decide to run scandisk while I'm playing - and that actually makes the game work perfectly. Any ideas as to what might be going on here? I've checked all the power management settings, which seems to be a logical place to start, but still no go.

Thanks!