Originally posted by: the Chase
Originally posted by: Luckyboy1
But of course, if you have to choose, it will be RAID over Raptor. So why do I say both?
Well, there's more to drive performance than map load time. What about playing online where you may be dealing with skin downloads from other players? Also, there are some things that regardless of how you do it, Cousin Billy's programming simply won't hold the information in RAM and as a result, I still say both!
This may be a slightly unrelated question- but do you(or anyone) know what the slowdowns or "freezes" are caused by when playing a game and the computer is accessing the HD?
I realize the slowdown is caused buy the actual writing(or reading) to/from the HD, but what is it writing or reading excatly? Seems to be really bad at the start of the game and continually smooths out the longer you play the same map and then happens all over again on a new map. Still loading textures to memory or?
I'm very tired and as a result, the last few posts by me have been complete bonkers! Not so much in this thread, but I wanted to warn you because I may make a mistep here and really need to hit the sack! Dealing with all these sick people at my job has drained me apparently!
Anyways, to your question and I think the question is that infamous stutter you get and in most cases, you reduce it best by making sure you have first stripped all the stems and seeds that you don't need as afar as processes that Cousin Billy has running by default that not only hog RAM and CPU cycles just idling there, but can cause security concerns in some cases as well. then you will want to make sure you are not running applications you are not using at the moment. Keeping a browser open or a IM service at hand when not needed will eat up available RAM as well. See, if there is not enough RAM to run all the processes at once, it dumps it to the hard drive in something called the page file. Comparatively, going to and from the page file is much slower than having it sit in RAM. However, there are some things that Cousin Billy's and other programs do that are going to dump to the page file or other files as well regardless of how much RAM you have so I NEVER advise turning the page file off. I most often advise leaving it in system managed and that's MicroSoft's advice as well. I personally use a large, static page file of 3000 initial and 3000 final and that only gives me a slight and rare advantage over system managed when and if ever the system managed style decides to resize your page file. Also, the large and static page file tends to fragment slower and I'm not sure why, but even this is not muuch of a concern as page files generally fragment at a prettty slow pace compared to other files.
I would strongly suggest having Diskeeper Pro. Unlike Cousin Billy's defragmenter, it is ultra fast and also will degfrag the page file while it's at it and Cousin Billy's won't. Set it up so it can monitor things for about a day of real life use and then after that, disable the function until you substantially change something. This way, the active monitoring won't slow you down. It will give you improved performance and make your drives theoretically last longer due to not having to search as much for files.
Having at least a Gig of RAM is essential these days and in many applications, two Gigs is now desired and best. You want all the RAM to be of the same size and speed and prefferably brand and model RAM. Getting those "matched sets" are of little benefit if any for most. All the RAM should be of the same size and on two cards.
