How to speed up program load

[HoosierDadE]

Hi,

I'm involved with a PC F1 racing league that has a 10 minute limit on qualifying. You have to restart the game every time you go out on the track. Some tracks have laps quick enough to do two sessions in the 10 minute limit but others take too long with the load time of the game. Always looking for a competitive edge, what are ways to significantly speed up the game load?

The game is EA F1-2002 started by an anti-cheating program. Its already being run off the HD (WD 120SE). The PC runs XP Home. I've heard that XP can be told to cache programs in advance but also that it learns them automatically so I don't know if there is anything along those lines.

Is there maybe a utility to snapshot a running (but idle) program and then load that instead of making the program go through all the initialization? Sort of like Hibernate but for a program instead of Windows?

I know I could use two PCs but that is kind of overkill from a price perspective.

I really couldn't tell which forum to post this in so if it goes somewhere else, please let me know.

TIA

 

[T3C]

add more ram?

 

[HoosierDadE]

Originally posted by: cybpnk
add more ram?

Whoops, I should have said the PC already has more than enough memory. The PC has 1GB of DDR and its not all used.

A lot of the time is spent opening hundreds of little files (for each car, the track, the landscape, etc, etc..) and arranging them in memory for game play.

I thought of putting the game on a virtual disk but that would only speed up the file loads and could cause a problem because the program writes huge log files which go to the same folder the game is run from. Can you create a Vdisk thats bigger than physical memory (with the swap file handling the excess which would probably not be used)?

edit: also FWIW, the PC is a Dell 4500 P4 2gHz 400 FSB.