Carma 2 XP Super slowdown??

[Cool Hand Luke]

I just decided to get back into Carma2 and was suprised by the amount of stuff available for it! I read on the forums about how to get it to work with xp, downloaded the patch and nocd, installed it and ran the d3d version... only to have it crash. I unplugged my wheel and it worked fine. After about 10-15secs in the game it slows down so bad that you have to shutdown the game.. Any ideas? My specs are:

Celeron 850

256mb ram

64mb GF2 MX 400

XP Pro

[Powdered Toast MAAAN!!]

XP is your problem.

[Cool Hand Luke]

hmm i know carma2 is not ment for it but people have it working fine with it, what can i do, apart from install 98

[Cool Hand Luke]

Ive tried closing all programs, everything but it still slows down that much that not even the mouse is controllable.. proberly about .5fps, but it still runs through every animation, so it takes around about 5mins to exit the game

[Dark Angel]

Dont install lame98.

And, c2 is just being as lame, you've probably got something running in the background making it slow. Like norton antivirus, that slows my c2 unless i disable it.

[Small Block]

O.K...you've closed all the background programs, but have you tried stopping some services? NT/XP loads a lot of stuff by default, but most ppl don't need all of that(I'd be very surprised if you really needed the clipbook, for example!).

Also what size is your pagefile, how much RAM do you have, and is your HD defragmented?

All of that stuff COULD have an impact...

[Cool Hand Luke]

Dont know what services i have going, things like system restore are off, i have 256mb ram and a 420mb swap file, which may not be through the roof in size, but should be more than enough for a game that was made in '98 no? I cant even get to drive in the game, its in the actual menu's where it slows to a stop if you let it go long enough, not even the mouse will move smoothly.