What are your PC specs?
cwykes:
Here's mine from dxdiag. I have an aging Dell which has never had any problems, unlike both of my son's custom built gaming machines. I game up on the integrated graphics and bought a (PCI) graphics card after about a month of having the sims grind to a halt at dawn and dusk. I got into building small lots early on!!! It runs the base game very nicely, but I don't fancy adding Uni or NL to this set up. couldn't stand to go back to low quality graphics and lots of slowdowns
Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2
System Manufacturer: Dell Computer Corporation
System Model: Dimension 2400
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.66GHz
Memory: 510MB RAM
Card name: RADEON 9250
Manufacturer: ATI Technologies Inc.
Chip type: RADEON 9200 Series (0x5960)
thanks for all the info - do tell me if I'm wrong about adding Uni & NL.
veilchen:
Thanks bunches for the great advice, both of you. I went and upped the VM (I hope I was supposed to do that), and I'll try and see if that helps the game's choppiness. I get the 'Virtual Memory too low' when I have not even entered a lot yet, so maybe that was the problem. I shut down McAffee (again, I hope that wasn't a braindeadness move), and I made sure the game does pay primary attention to 'programs'. The VM is now set to 'initial: 1000, maximum 3000 MB. I know you wrote 100 and 800 in your other post Hegelian, but that didn't help any at all, I got 'VM is too low' almost immediately upon initially loading the game. I hope I didn't do anything really foolish.
Hegelian, I wish I could afford to update my computer, but I am so broke it's almost funny. I can put some things on my christmas list though; I have to check and see your posts again to find out what should be top priority. I have no clue what 'disc thrashing' means, but boy, its scary :D
Hegelian:
Quote from: veilchen on 2005 December 04, 21:23:58
I wish I could afford to update my computer, but I am so broke it's almost funny. I can put some things on my christmas list though; I have to check and see your posts again to find out what should be top priority. I have no clue what 'disc thrashing' means, but boy, its scary :D
Hey, I've been there a lot recently. It is difficult to evaluate any PC without being able to actually open it up, but from the speciifications that are available on the HP/Compaq Web site, it seems that your current computer probably cannot be upgraded much further—and the increase in performance you could get would probably be too little to justifiy the cost. I suspect that you might be better off just waiting until you can afford to replace it. I do not know what prices are like in Germany, but in the U.S. you can get a new PC that will run TS2 quite well for much less than 1000 USD, if you keep your current mouse, keyboard, and monitor instead if buying new ones along with the PC.
"Disk thrashing" is just a term to describe all the hard drive activity (and the sound that goes with it) when Windows accesses the swap file a lot. Usually making the virtual memory smaller will reduce how much Windows moves data back and forth to and from the swap file, and increasing the minimum size of the swap file will increase the amount of data swapping.
To be honest, I have never seen a "Virtual Memory too low" message from any application. I don't really know what that could mean. You have more than enough system memory for TS2 to run without needing a big swap file. The only thing I can think of is that maybe you are running out of space on the hard drive? But this is just a guess.
Setting a swap file (paging file/virtual memory) "too big" will not hurt anything, but it could have a negative affect on your PC's performance, because Windows could end up swapping a lot more data from RAM to the swap file than it needs to. If your game performance does not improve with the new settings, I would suggest that you change the Virtual Memory setting back to System Managed Size, since reducing the size of the swap file from what Windows recommends seems to cause problems for you.
AllenABQ:
3.2Ghz Pentium 4 processor
2 GB DDR 3200 RAM
Nvidia GeForce 5600 FX w/ 256MB
on board sound (really need to upgrade this)
All in all I get darn good framerates. I just need to pare down all my downloads so the game loads faster!
veilchen:
Hegelian, have you checked out this site yet? What do you think abou the product, can something like that really help those with non-updatable computers?
http://www.sci.fi/~borg/rambooster/index.html
It looks pretty good to me, but what do I know. Maybe some people can benefit from it if it does what it promises. I found the link to it on a german site:
http://www.zdnet.de/downloads/prg/b/w/de0BBW-wc.html
but I have no idea if it might, possibly, hopefully, maybe help :D
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