Why do games take forever to install?

[Sporko]

I just installed MOH:AA and Ghost Recon and both took forever to install. MOH:AA took almost a full hour! I haven't installed new games for a while but that can't be right, can it?

My cdrom is a 40X and my comp is a XP1700 with an UDMA hard drive. I don't notice any slowdowns while playing the games just when installing. I tried installing from my 16/10/40 CDRW and got the same thing.

Any ideas?

 

[Hankysmoo]

Something is definately wrong. Games only take me about maybe 5 or 10 mins max for them to install. What kind of motherboard do you have?

 

[Sporko]

Yes, that's all I thought it should take.

My motherboard is a ECS K7S5A.

Anybody have any advice as to where I should start looking for the problem?

 

[YaKuZa]

I would say your IDE cables and connections.

 

[Wingznut]

Make sure DMA is enabled on your IDE controllers. (I'll bet it's not. )

 

[scottrico]

Is your cd rom and hard drive on the same ide cable?
Is the hard drive defraged?


also, it could be the cd.
when I purchased diablo 2, It took forever to install but I later learned that it was a bad cd burn.
One of the other disks could not be read at all.
I exchanged the game and there was no more issues.

 

[Adrian Tung]

Your CD-ROM drive may not like the Safedisc copy protection that's embedded onto the CDs. Or, like scottrico said, it could be a bad CD burn like Diablo 2.


atwl

 

[Sporko]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I tried the CD's on another computer and they loaded much quicker so I think I can rule out bad CD's.

On Primary I have a Maxtor 60GB as master and a Maxtor 10GB as slave. On secondary, I have a LiteOn 161040 CDRW as master and Acer 40x CDROM as slave.

How do I check if DMA is enabled on my IDE controllers? In Device Manager the only place I can find a reference to DMA is under Disk Drives which show DMA is checked. If I look under Hard Disk Controllers I don't see anywhere to set DMA. BTW, using Win98 SE.

 

[Sporko]

bump

 

[Adrian Tung]

How do I check if DMA is enabled on my IDE controllers? In Device Manager the only place I can find a reference to DMA is under Disk Drives which show DMA is checked. If I look under Hard Disk Controllers I don't see anywhere to set DMA. BTW, using Win98 SE.

In Windows 2000 and XP, the settings are located at the IDE controllers. For 98 and ME, they're under Disk Drives.


atwl