Unresponsive Interface

I don't think I'm the first to have problems with a slow and unresponsive FM interface. I'm starting this thread as I'm not sure of the conditions that cause it and if it is a terminal problem. The background of my current situation:

I started a career in the Bundesliga. Around 20 nations and 36 playable leagues with a large database. My laptop has a Core2Duo 2.0 GHz with 3-4GB of RAM. I could perhaps understand how the day-to-day processing would take longer than normal as my setup is fairly significant, but that is not where my problem lies.

For starters, on the first day of my career (in game time it was June 12th), the interface was snappy enough and I had no qualms. I could go from player card to player card and it would be plenty zippy. But I'm now less than a month into my career (July 8th) and everything is very, very slow and unresponsive. It's like the game is a whole second or two behind the actions of my mouse. It's not uncommon for me to have to click things twice or even three times. Going through my entire squad's player cards now takes 3 times as long. Going up and down menus is a total drag as well.

Has anyone determined what causes this? The only thing I can think of is the amount of leagues and size of database I chose. But shouldn't that only effect the amount of time it takes to process in between days? Is there any hope for my current career? Will this problem get even worse as I progress through this career? Thanks for any guidance on this matter.

Are you patched up?

This was a problem I had before 9.3.0 but haven't had an issues since.

Might be worth checking what if anything is running in the background when FM is running. Check that your anti virus or spyware checker is not doing a constant sweep in real time

I get this on the day of a match, it's so annoying when trying to open any drop-down menus.

Are you patched up?

This was a problem I had before 9.3.0 but haven't had an issues since.

Definitely patched as I've got the Steam version and I reinstalled the game about a month ago. I've turned my antivirus off, I've checked for unnecessary background programs, but I keep my computer very clean, so I'm certain there's no issue there.

I'll run a little test here and start a new game with the same setup. I'll be surprised if anything is out of the ordinary, since I'll be going back to day one.

So I'm looking at task manager. Is it normal for the game to be using CPU when it's just sitting on a a squad page and not simming anything? 561K of memory seems like quite a bit too, but I have plenty of unused RAM.

I have to click multiple times to actually do anything on FM and I have to carefully type in words in the search box. But my computer is slow, old and rubbish so it's understandable.

Little update. I started a new career with the same setup and the lag was still there. Decided to quit messing around as I had no idea what else to check, so I reinstalled Vista. The very first thing I did was install FM, so nothing else could affect things. Well, I've loaded up my career and everything is fine. That's the good news. The bad news is that I have no idea what caused the problem in the first place and I don't know what to avoid doing!

Looks like that's two of us! Check the FAQ & solutions (or something like that) thread for my troubles which look very similar – a SI person asked for a dxdiag dump so I'll be sending it and if indeed your issue is the same as mine we might get a solution. Or at least share the sadness and despair!

Always happens in FM and has done for a few versions now. Even on my machine (amd x2 6000+, 4gb RAM, X1950 Pro) running just one league, on a small database, the interface requires two clicks on match days, every other time its fine. (Even on 9.3). Personally, I put the issue down to the problems with threading that FM has, in particular with AMD processors, which SI seem to have trouble working with.

This is with only the usual stuff running in the background (anti-virus and windows services). I even tried running the game with those disabled, as well as windows defender when I was trying to get to the bottom of the freezing issues, no joy, it still does it.

Definitely patched as I've got the Steam version and I reinstalled the game about a month ago. I've turned my antivirus off, I've checked for unnecessary background programs, but I keep my computer very clean, so I'm certain there's no issue there.

You dont need to stop your anti-virus completely. Just get it to ignore the folders that FM uses. There should be an option saying something about exclusions. So just add the FM folders there. Open up the task manager and select processes and see if there is anything there that can be disabled. Quite a lot of these process can be stopped without doing harm to your computer. Dont touch any called svchost.exe because stopping these can cause issues I have found.

I too have a powerful machine with an unresponsive interface using 9.3.0. When changing tactics I always click more than once just to make sure it goes to the tactics screen. If I don't the games gone forwards 5 minutes before I've noticed it's not responded. My set-up isn't too over the top either with something like 13 leagues loaded, plus quite a few extra players.

Always happens in FM and has done for a few versions now. Even on my machine (amd x2 6000+, 4gb RAM, X1950 Pro) running just one league, on a small database, the interface requires two clicks on match days, every other time its fine. (Even on 9.3). Personally, I put the issue down to the problems with threading that FM has, in particular with AMD processors, which SI seem to have trouble working with.

This is with only the usual stuff running in the background (anti-virus and windows services). I even tried running the game with those disabled, as well as windows defender when I was trying to get to the bottom of the freezing issues, no joy, it still does it.

I have an AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ and I have never had any issues with the interface being slow, threading or the general processing time of the game. :confused:

Do you use XP?

Do you use XP?

Yeah I use XP. Do you use Vista?

I have been using Vista since January. Everything is still good after the Windows reinstall. I'm slowly adding everything that used to be on my computer. I have a hunch that my problem might have been graphics driver related. I haven't been using the drivers provided by dell for quite awhile (instead I had been using ones from laptopvideo2go.com).

Edit: I should mention that I recall running into the problem when I used XP as well, so I don't think it's related to the OS.

Mine always gets extremely boggy towards the ends of seasons but I put that down to still using 902.

I've only ever played with 9.0.3 and haven't had any problems whatsoever...

Yeah I have this issue as well. Real annoying but have learnt to live with it I guess. Had the same problem on FM08, sometimes I could click several times and nothing happens. This only happens on match days though. I belive it got fixed on some patch for 08, on 09 it's not as bad as it was once with the latest patch but it's clearly still a problem.

I used XP and Vista when playing FM08 and Vista/W7 for FM09. It's not OS related for sure and FM is the only game I've played that has this unresponsive menues. But like I said, only happens on match day, which is when the CPU kicks up in gear...why it does even before a single game is being played I don't know however.

FM is really not using multiple cores properly. I have installed the game again (I don't know why, I'm already ticked off with all the bugs that annoyed me the last time), and on match days, it is using all one core and not even touching the second, which is when the interface becomes unresponsive. Threading is ticked, it has affinity to both cores. Something's not right.