Upgrading Computer Hardware
Brynne:
Would creating a partition for the game help? Wait, I lost myself. I forget what a partition is. And, I don't have a second hard drive. Add me to the daily idiot...
Motoki:
It could, in theory. The partition sets aside a certain piece of the Hard Drive, so you could set one up for Sims 2 and it would help keep those files from being defragmented, however the main part of Sims 2 that loads slow isn't the stuff in Program Files/EA Games/ etc it's the stuff in My Documents/EA Games/... and in particular the downloads folder. Setting aside another parition will require you to name a set size, but your download folder, if it's like mine, will probably keep growing. So if you set the partition for it too small then you might run out of space for downloads and if you make it too big, then it's kind of wasting space you could be using for other stuff. Also, it might be tricky to get My Documents over onto a different partition than Windows is installed on. I don't think you can just up and move it to another drive letter because the game will be looking for it on, say C: and not expect to find it on E: etc.
It's probably doable but IMO will complicate things and not worth the effort but maybe someone else has some different thoughts on this.
chintznibbles:
Edit: Whoops, I just noticed that the computer in question is a laptop. You can pretty much disregard any notion of upgrading it yourself, then- they're tricky bastards for even extremely experienced amateurs (like me, for instance). Probably best to have any kind of work done on it done by either the company that made it, if you have a support contract, or a large-scale technician place. Small-time techs and people's friends who are great with computers probably won't cut it.
If you can afford it, I'd say pop the RAM up to 1gb and get a faster hard drive. 4200 is pretty.. um... not going to say "dinosaur-ish" ;) , but quite slow by today's standards. It's also because you have a laptop, and faster drives generate a lot of heat. I once owned a 10,000 RPM drive that could double as a space heater, but thankfully modern drives have the heat issue down a bit. Try to maximize the RPM and Buffer size with the actual storage space and price, whenever possible. If it's only a few dollars, always get something faster. ;)
Stuff regarding desktops:
If you're using a modern hard drive with a modern operating system, multiple partitions do very little good and only complicate things. Don't bother with them, says I. The only real benefit you get from having multiple partitions is the option to have smaller cluster sizes, which can save you a tiny bit of space on the drive (probably less that ~1GB. If you've got a 100GB+ drive, the like of which is quite affordable these days, that's not a whole lot- especially since you're still losing some to the file table and so forth anyway.)
That said, separate hard drives are a nice way to upgrade, and probably a good plan. Motoki's plan for Windows installation is a good one; just be sure that, like he mentioned earlier, that you buy a drive that your motherboard supports. If your computer is two years old (or more) and you haven't specifically replaced the motherboard in that time, odds are you'll need a standard IDE (ATA/PATA) drive. If you do have a SATA connector, which is small and square (random googled image: http://www.cselex.com/images-large/SATA-Signal-Cable-1.jpg) then you can use a SATA drive. Be warned that vanilla Windows XP (with no service packs) has issues with SATA drives, since it came out before they did, mostly. You may not be able to install a no-service-pack version of windows on one. SP1 is the minimum, I believe.
Also, you can get 1GB of ram for about $100 at electronics stores (near me, at least). I think my sister just paid $114 for a gig of some brand-name stuff with a fancy heatsink at my local Fry's Electronics. You might shop around online, too, if that's your bag. Just be careful of generic ram- some of it's not so great. RAM is one of the places it normally pays to buy brand-name.
DrBeast:
I don't think anyone's mentioned defragging. If you write and delete stuff all the time (especially large stuff), you'll see performance go up a bit after a defrag. Don't expect WARP speed though. 5400 rpm is slow, no matter what.
Kala:
My computer has put me in a postion in which I have to choose between playing with downloads or playing with EPs. If I have more than 200 downloads in my Uni game, it take forever for a house to lode. When I say forever, I'm not exadurating that much. I've had to turn off my computer to stop a house from loading several times. When I get families/houses past the loading screen, the family is frozen. I stile have issues now that I'm only playing TS2. I spiritedly get ATI error messages when I place lots in a neighborhood.
I have a Dell Dimension 2,300 with a 1,7 P4 processor. I have 1,024 of 256 DDR RAM and an ATI Radeon Sapphire 9,000 video card. I don't know weather I need a better video card or what.
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