Freezing problems

[Figger1]

I have a friend that when she was on the island and in the underground island area and spider cave, she had no problems, but when she got to Serbule hills, the problems started. Occasionally the game freezes, she cant tell what the items in inventory are or the icons on the screen, she points to them and nothing happens, no labels. She has a toshiba laptop on windows 7, with 4GB ram, Intel graphics family video with 64mb, I helped her increase her virtual page file but nothing seems to help. Sometimes when it freezes, she uses task manager to close it and she gets message that "windowsplayer.exe" is not responding. Her graphics setting in game settings is set to 0: Bad.
I have looked in settings and I cant find any settings to turn down ( that i know of ) to maybe fix the problem. If anyone knows any tricks to fix her problem, it would be appreciated.

She recently had a huge update for windows 7 and one file had a 9C48 error.

[Vish]

turn off tree turn off grass water effect=0 etc
all in advanced graphic option

(Delete Win7 install one of few Lightweight Linux Distros as last resort:) <half joking half seriously here)

[Figger1]

I looked into those settings and when Graphics setting is 0: Bad, all those settings are automatically set to zero.

[ShieldBreaker]

There are 2 graphic settings below Bad, -1 and -2. Also something to keep in mind is that having a web browser, or itunes or other music player open while playing with barely enough memory will also limit how much resources PG has to work with, so if anyone has extra programs like that open and are having problems they should try to play with those exited completely out of.

[Turbo]

I have a friend that when she was on the island and in the underground island area and spider cave, she had no problems, but when she got to Serbule hills, the problems started.

I have the same exact problem. When I leave the cave I start getting 3-6 FPS which is unplayable. I even tried the setting on Terrible with everything set to zero and it still didn't work. Boxes would start popping up and flashing and I had to restart the entire game just to be able to do anything. I had to bug it as stuck to get back to starter area. I see this has been an issue for at least a year and hasn't been fixed. Whatever is causing the problem, they should make it a priority asap. I was just about to buy the game as I find it incredibly entertaining but I can't until I can actually play the game past the starting area. My system is able to run other games no problem and I have a hard time understanding why I can't run this one. My drivers are up to date. I'll check in with the game's progress from time to time to see if they ever fix the issue. I'm hoping they do because I really like this game.

[Tagamogi]

I see this has been an issue for at least a year and hasn't been fixed.

Actually, there have been lots of incremental performance fixes in the last year, especially after the game became available on Steam. Serbule and Serbule Hills used to be awful zones for me, now I don't notice a problem (although I do have to keep the graphics at Good or lower). Of course, that doesn't help you since you still have problems now, sorry. Just saying that this is an area that has seen quite a bit of work (with more coming).

Since you've already tried lowering the graphics, the only suggestion I can come up with right now is to try the game in windowed mode instead of fullscreen - maybe even with a really low resolution like 640 x 480, just to see if that helps at all.

You may also want to make triple sure that your machine isn't running anything but the game. I will get flashing dialog boxes in PG if I try to run 3 instances of PG at once, or 2 + a spreadsheet (don't ask why). If I only run 1-2 instances of PG and nothing else, everything works fine. If my computer stats can be believed, I'm doing fine on memory and CPU when the flashing happens, so I don't know what it is - graphics card memory??

[Figger1]

what do u mean running more instances of PG

[Turbo]

In my last game I used to be the one telling others to lower settings, turn off background programs, etc in order for them to reduce their lag whilst I had no issues. I have absolutely nothing else running. In fact, it's almost comical how nothing else is actually running except the bare minimum needed for the computer to run as I game. It's just strange, I was starting to wonder if maybe it had something to do with Steam or something. At this point I don't know what else to do. It's probably due to the game not being optimized which I know is a huge undertaking. Maybe in the future I'll try again. Thanks for your help though.