Weird thing happening
 

I have a thing that is happening when I play p1999. Often when I am playing there is a pause in the game, sometimes coinciding with a noise as if the disk drive is being used, then a few seconds later the game kicks in again. Its not when I'm just sitting there, but when I'm actively fighting something, or like last night when I leveled. It is enough to make some soloing with my necromancer pretty dicey.
Any advice as to fix this? I'm not running from a DVD rom or anything like that, and it doesnt happen when I am playing on my second laptop (a macbook air)

Get an SSD.

As in solid state drive? I play on a laptop

Yup. Changes your life.

An alternative if you don't want to buy a new HD would be to use something like RAMDisk.

Whenever someone logs in or travels to the zone you're in, the game hiccups as it loads that information. Running EQ on a SSD seems to be the only way to mitigate this hiccup.

Do you have logging turned on? if so make sure your Antivirus software isn't trying to scan the logs. Also you may want to try renaming your log file and having EQ start a new one if it is getting large.

Do you know if the game will run off a USB data stick? Would this fix the issue as well?

I started with a fresh install and it still has the same issue. Man it was a bitch re-organising my UIs lol

This was happening to me for like 2 weeks and just went away, been playn on same laptop for 7 years. The screen pauses, skips and puter makes a odd noise.

It fixed itself , I thought my puter was getting fried.