Guide:Momentum07's Guide To Reduce Lag in Combat Arms

Lag is one of the things that causes players to bang their fists on their computers in disgust as their screens display themselves walking and shooting at the speed of sloths. But not to worry, even a few touch-ups can reduce this aggravating problem.

There are many ways to make you have less lag. First off, make sure you have no open programs. Also be sure that you're playing on the lowest graphics settings, for the best performance.

Control Panel
If your laptop is laggy, and you're running on battery and don't care about saving battery life, go to Control Panel &gt; Power Options, and then select High Performance. You could also right click the battery icon, then select Power Options, then set the battery to High Performance.

Warning: This will also decrease the time your battery will run.

You can also try freeing up disk space with disk cleanup and disk defragmentation.

Clean Corrupted Registry Keys Created by Combat Arms
Sometimes the registry keys created by the game get corrupted and cause the game to lag. The Windows Registry is an important component of the operating system and stores all the information about computer programs. Using a reliable Registry Cleaner and PC Optimizer such as RegInOut can fix most game lag on your system.

Task Managing
A good way to reduce lag, shown on many YouTube videos, is simply to use your Task Manager to adjust performance settings. Return to the desktop (without closing Combat Arms, this can be accomplished by pressing the "Windows" button or pressing both ALT and TAB on your keyboard simultaneously.) Open your Task Manager (CTRL + ATL + DEL). Go to the Process tab in the Manager, which allows you to see all the applications your computer is running, including system processes and applications. Find the Combat Arms process, named Engine.exe, and right click this. Several options (depending on what version of Windows you're running) will appear. There should be an option that says Set Priority. Change the priority to High, which allows more RAM to be allocated to Combat Arms by reducing the amount available to other programs. This also allows for more processing power to be dedicated to the game. However, one occasional in-game effect is that everything slows down, including movement speed, bullets, explosions, etc., similar to F.E.A.R.'s Reflex Time, which can sometimes be annoying. The only real application for this is to dodge bullets.

Note: If you are using Vista, when you try to set priority a message will pop up saying something along the lines of "Access Denied" unless you have administrator privileges. Luckily, there is another way to change the priority of programs. Open the Task Manager and go to the Processes tab. There should be a process labeled "csrss.exe". If you have it, right click it and there should be an option (it's probably the only one) that says "Perform Administrative Tasks". Click on it and press continue. Open Combat Arms, and follow the steps in the last paragraph.

If you happen to be using Windows 7, then you can also adjust the priority of tasks, but you'll need to go through an extra step. Before you can adjust the priorities of programs, you have to find where it says Show Processes from All Users. This will give you the ability to change the priority. After you enable that, right click on the Engine.exe process, which will cause five options to appear. Click Set Priority, change it to High, and go play!

Outside Programs
Some programs can be extremely useful for optimizing your computer, which in turn makes Combat Arms run faster. Game Booster, made by IObit, is a good program to use. It shuts down all unnecessary processes to reduce the amount of RAM being used, which speeds up your computer, and can restart the processes it stops instantly. Advanced System Care by IObit is also good. It cleans up your computer in order to make it run faster and comes with other programs which can enhance your computer or help reduce the amount of RAM used by other programs. These programs can help reduce lag by a lot, and even help speed your computer up in general.

Some of the free major lag reducing programs:

Game Booster: http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html

Advanced System Care: http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html

CCleaner: http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

Smart Defrag: http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html

NOTE: When downloading programs outside of Combat Arms, make sure they're safe. Two major ways would be to use Symatec's Safeweb Site Checked, this checks for security of certain sites. Another one would be McAfee's SiteAdvisor - located on bottom right corner of the page.

XFire
This program can, potentially, bog down computers that would otherwise be running the game at 60+ Frames per second if you use the function that shows you the FPS rate, and will cause you to average 25-35 FPS on an otherwise decent PC. Also, if you're using the broadcast or recording functions, be prepared for everything to get slower. You don't necessarily have to quit this program, but it is highly advised that you turn off many of the functions that it has.

Pando Media Booster
Essentially, Nexon now has a little thing called Pando Media Booster added to all of their games when you install them for the first time. The name doesn't give away much and almost makes it sound like a good thing to keep around. It's not. Essentially what it does is help the company offload the reponsibility of sharing all their patches, data, and files. It turns yours computer into a P2P client. While this doesn't seem bad, you need to remember you are seeding as well and that can increase a lot more bandwidth usage. It isn't illegal of them to do this but it can drain your money and cause you to lag. Simply delete the program by uninstalling it from Programs and Features on your computer. If you need to redownload Combat Arms later on, you'll need to install it again.