Hello everyone. This is my first post, and I hope it's ok to start a new topic for my rather odd problem with Gta IV's pc edition.

A few days ago I finally got my hands on Gta and installed it. At first everything seemed to be right. But than the nightmare started. I can play the game flawlessly on medium settings in 1024x768, but only for an unpredictable amount of time. Than the game starts to act wierd. It starts lagging and chopping. If I'm lucky it just takes down my fps from 40-50 to 5-10 and I can still play, even though quite unpleasantly. But most of the times it's more like 1 or 2 frames per a half a minute! A few times I was able to play it for hours without any problems, but most of the times just a few minutes. Sometimes when I start the game it's already chopping, and I can't even hit quit, 'cause it's hard to control the pointer when it reacats minutes later.It does it without any obvious reasons, just when "the mood hit it". I'm pretty sure it isn't my hardware, since I don't have problems with other games, and as i said I was able to play it a few times for hours. I installed the patch, got the latest drivers, defragmented, everything, but nothing helped. Anyone has this problem? Or even better a solution to it? It's really getting on my nervs.

My machine:

OS: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.3GHz

Memory: 2046MB RAM

Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT (gainwards)

User: Desperate.