RAM (OR GUNBOAT) ??

[MUTTLEY]

Firstly, just bought FOF. Secondly, not sure if this is the right way to seek advice but I'll give it a go.

My pc has a 1.6Ghz (Pentium 4) chip, 512Mb RAM and a 64Mb Video Card. Although I've added LOWANIM and NOSOUND the game still takes 5-6 minutes to load from the "Quotation Screen". I've read on other threads that this is an inherent feature given the level of data to be loaded.

My question is would an upgrade to 1Gb RAM reduce this waiting time significantly - and presumably gaming time, once I actually get to read the manual and start playing ?? Not being a "pc techie" by any means I don't know if this like asking how long is a piece of string - but any responses gratefully received.

Thanks In Advance

[Erik Rutins]

Yes, going to 1GB RAM would be the single biggest performance improvement for FOF on your system.

[MUTTLEY]

Thank you, Erik. Wow, that was quick - guess it's the advantage of being 5 hours behind the UK. You're still at work !! Looks like a trip to PC World, then.

[Gil R.]

Have you defragmented your harddrive recently? FOF doesn't run as quickly on badly fragmented drives.

[MUTTLEY]

Yes, indeed. A few weeks ago and I also checked it last night to see if loading FOF had caused a problem - not that it should have done, of course. All was well. I am leaning very much toward the RAM as being the problem. All other avenues appear to be okay, tbh.

Out of interest - does 5-6 minutes to load seem a (relative) long time ??

[Gil R.]

I have 1GB RAM, and it takes a minute or so to load. I don't know whether 5-6 minutes is a long time for a 500MB system to load, but I do know that that's much longer than the game should load if you have more memory.

[ericbabe]

It takes about 3 minutes to load on our 512MB test machine, so 5-6 minutes is a bit higher than we've experienced, but with 512MB, even in lowanim mode, you're going to do some caching to virtual memory, and the speed of VM is really hard to predict.