Random freeze/stutter in Win7

[tibetanpunk]

I ran this game flawlessly in XP, but since changing over to Win7 I am getting this weird slowdown/stutter/freeze thing that happens seemingly at random, for a fraction of a second...Like the game slows down, pauses, then speeds back up again.

My system:
Win7 64bit
E6700 2.6Ghz
4GB OCZ DDR2 800
4850 512MB

Changing settings doesn't help. It makes the game very frustrating to play as the slowdown usually results in a crash.

At all other times my FPS are perfect and as I said, it ran flawlessly on the same settings in XP.

Anyone know of a solution/fix?

[freibooter]

Is it possible that you have various, changing wallpapers activated in Windows 7? For me these slowdowns appear (in almost any resource intensive game) whenever Windows 7 changes the desktop's wallpaper. You might want to reduce the amount of different wallpapers, increase the interval or disable this feature altogether and see if it solves the problem.

[Kaerar]

Almost certain it's that auto overclock function now you posted in here too.

Makes it far worse online as you usually cause carnage in collision on races...

[tibetanpunk]

Almost certain it's that auto overclock function now you posted in here too.

Makes it far worse online as you usually cause carnage in collision on races...

Yep, you are correct. I had put AI-NOS on to squeeze a bit more performance out of Bad company 2 and apparently this game and Dirt don't play nicely with it.
I turned it off and all the slowdowns are gone.

Cheers again! :)

[Masterclown]

Tibetanpunk, what version and bit-type of Win7 are you running? I want to upgrade my machine to Win7Pro, 64bit (my company provides it for free), but I'd rather not lose Dirt2 or Grid. :)

[tibetanpunk]

Win7 HP 64bit. Since I disabled the auto-overclocking feature on my ASUS motherboard it is back to running very smoothly again.

Overall Win7 has been a very good experience so far. Highly recommend it, though download the win7 compatibility tool (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1b544e90-7659-4bd9-9e51-2497c146af15&displaylang=en) just to make sure all your hardware is ok.