Simviation Forums

I've been trying to play one of my favorite games of all time, thief 2, on my new comp.  Windows XP, SP2.  My previous comp also had XP, but no SP2.  Exact specs aren't exactly necessary here because a) the game is six and a half years old and b) I had very similar specs on my old comp and the game ran fine.

I'm having a very strange problem where the game plays perfectly for anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes, and then seemingly totally randomly freezes.  When I alt+tab out, the task manager shows the game taking up 0% of the CPU.  In my experience, when a game freezes, the CPU is maxed at 100%.

I've scoured the Eidos forums for other people who have this problem, and found only two threads.  Neither thread had a solution.  I was hoping it was somehow related to the onboard card that came with the system, but I borrowed my buddy's 7600GS and that's not the problem (deep down I knew it wasn't related, but a guy can hope).  I know for a fact this game can run just fine in XP, so now I'm wondering if the problem isn't SP2.

Back to the original question-is there any significance to a game freezing while taking up 0% cpu?

Funny how right when you ask for help you find the solution.  I noticed that the problem didn't start showing up in other people's games until about tthree years ago, which indicated a conflict with more modern hardware, then I thought about how I was getting 0% CPU usage on the freeze...  *BING* DUH I have a dual core processor.  Changed Thief 2's affinity to CPU 0 only and all is peachy.  Funny how it turns out that it WOULD'VE helped to list my specs  ::)

Go to msconfig disable all backgound software or check if VDO card is ok.I do that some times it works.