Upgrading Computer Hardware
Motoki:
You know, I also used to think you had to buy the absolute best card out there to keep it from being obsolete as soon as possible but now I think it's better to get the best value for the money and the best card you can afford. Getting the best card out there probably means spend $300+ US and if you consider the whole SLI/Crossfire thing (getting two video cards and having them work together in tadem to run even faster) it's twice that. A lot of times there $50-$100 difference between the highest performance card and the next one down when the actual difference in performance is around 5%. CPUs are like this too. I don't think a 5-10% performance increase is worth $100.
The video card advances have thankfully leveled off to some degree from what they've been in the past where a new generation card would come out quite literally every 3 months. I think even a $70-$100 card can last at least a couple of years if you're fine with not having to have the absolute best video card on the market. And a lot depends on what you do with the card. For playing TS2 I don't think you need as good of a card as say some of the more recent FPS (First Person Shooter) games. For someone going from an old Geforce 4000 series card, for the purpose of playing TS2 almost any video card from the last year or so, even the lower end ones, are going to offer some improvement, enough that I think it's worth justifying getting an upgrade and certainly better than not having one.
Now if someone has the money and wants a high end top of the line card by all means don't let me stop you, I used to be one of those people. ;) But now I prefer to try and research find what I can determine to be the best performance to price ratio, and I also have to take budget considerations into account since I'm no longer living at home with my parents rent-free. ;)
Brynne:
Can I jump in, too? Can someone tell me how much or if the harddrive speed affects performance? I bought my laptop about 6 weeks ago specifically for the Sims 2 and it plays the game beautifully and smoothly at medium settings, and decently at high settings. Cinematics work great. But the load times are terrible! Is that due to the hard drive? I know it's also my overstuffed downloads folder, but on other applications I've noticed load times are slow. It's not spyware or anything. Spyware removal is my other hobby. I'm anal about it. Anyway, my harddrive is an 80 GB 4,200RPM, and it is upgradeable. How would upgradeing my hard drive affect game play? And what should I upgrade to? Would a 5400RPM be enough, or should I go higher? I also need more RAM, as I only have 512MB. Which does RAM have a bigger impact on: load-times or performance? Would it be better to spend my money on a new hard drive or RAM, if I had to choose between the two? I can't do both right now. Like I said, performance is pretty decent. Loading is horrible.
For all you computer tekkies, don't laugh at me if I'm speaking gibberish. I'm clueless about computer hardware!
I guess I should probably give my specs? It's a WinBook W364.
Intel Pentium M 2GHz
512MB RAM
Ati Mobility Radeon 9700 with 128MB dedicated
dizzy:
There's the issue of hard drive speed and the amount of RAM, and there's also the issue of your "swap" file (how big it is and where it's located).
You can speed things up quite a bit if you put the program and its files on one hard drive and the "swap" file (the virtual memory paging file) on another drive.
Here's a good link for that: http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm
Motoki:
Getting a faster HD will help somewhat, 4200 RPMs is pretty slow these days, but only for the load times really and it will only help so much. If you're a total download whore (like me! ;) ) then I'm sorry to say that you're pretty much stuck with slow load times. Start the game up and go grab a cup of coffee or something. ;)
Brynne:
Yes, I'm a download whore :D My downloads folder is just over 3 GB! I just checked and I shocked myself. I *think* I need to do some housecleaning. Thing is, I just did. When I got this laptop I had only backed up about half of my downloads from my previous laptop. I had all intentions of keeping a much smaller download folder on the new lappy. Then I went to Sims Showcase, dammit. I need to remove that from my bookmarks.
So more RAM would be the way to go, then? And about the second drive: would that require reformatting my computer? And how would I go about setting that up? Virtual memory is another thing I'm clueless about. I've gotten the "Your system is low on virtual memory..." pop-up a few times. Virtual memory is a complete mystery to me. My husband has patiently explained it to me a billion times and I still don't get it. I have it set (custom) to minimum 1000MB and maximum 1500MB. Recommended is 766. 767 MB is currently allocated. What did I do wrong? Would putting the swap file on another drive improve that? I have to play the game in windowed mode because the damn virtual memory pop-up would minimize my game, and then getting back into the game would take forever.
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