| Author |
Hard Drive Seeking |
Deleted
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|  Posted: 2002-03-19 10:24
I am having problems with my hard drive seeking while I am playing. It happens much more during battles, or high action scenes. It happens way less if I enable write behind cacheing, though still happens. I have write behind cache disabled so that I decrease the risk of lost data suring power outage and lockups, the performance loss is negligable. My machine is a Celeron 300A @ 450Mhz, 320MB of RAM, Geforce 2 MX400 64MB and the game is installed on a 6.5GB 7200RPM drive with 1.2GB free. My windows swap file is on the first partition of a seperate drive, which is not seeking during game play. Any ideas how to slow or stop the drive from seeking, other than installing it on a ramdrive to play 
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Ragglock
Marshal
BIOnics Industry Syndicate
Joined: May 29, 2001
Posts: 1955
From: Denmark
| Posted: 2002-03-19 10:41
try to get Outertech Cacheman
it can:
· Optimize your Disk Cache, Name & Path Cache, CD-Rom Cache, and Icon Cache to speed up your computer
· Periodically recover memory
· Tweak several system settings to improve performance
· Watch & monitor several important system values within Cachman's graphical user interface, including the computer system Overview page, History Graph, Logging, and Tray Icon.
·Create System configuration reports
.Its freeware 
link me up
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LOVE the smell of human flesh in the morning smells like MVictory
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Deleted
Marshal
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| Posted: 2002-03-20 19:33
Well, I've tried that, but really I like to let Windows do it's own cache settings. Windows 98 is really actually not that bad at releasing cache when programs need memory. The enabling of write behind caching fixed most of my problem (I guess the game write to your drive quite a bit for some unknown reason). Past that I am still getting really choppy and nearly unplayable conditions during times when there are a bunch of ships around, which is exactly the time that you need the machine to be running smoothly. Any other ideas that could be cause something like this?
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Deleted
Marshal
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| Posted: 2002-07-18 14:09
Your issue could definitly be a resource issue.
What are your resources at?
What do you have as your virtual memory settings? Is windows managing your VR settings or have you done the suggested 150% of your ram (since Win 98 only utilizes 128meg of ram try setting it to 150% of 128 meg. approx 200meg as max and 128 as min.
Also take items that are not needed at startup out of startup
Also make sure your First ram chip is your largest one. I believe win 98 only looks at the first 128megs of the first chip but i could be wrong.
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Deleted
Marshal
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| Posted: 2002-07-18 16:11
Wow, I havn't even played the game in a couple of months now. I gave up cause of unplayability and user whining. Plus i really didn't have the cash to sign up, so always playing with the little ships was really horrid. All you do is get blown away all the time. Thanks for the attempt though, it's a nice thought. i fixed the problem mostly by just making a 64MB RAM drive and running the game off of there. I couldn't quite figure out why, but the game just kept wanting access to my drive when lots of things were going on and it would chug up the machine. The RAM drive fixed that perfectly. I probably won't have the problem very soon if I ever do come back, I just ordered myself a nice P4 overclock combo that should do nicely.
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Deleted
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| Posted: 2002-08-03 16:47
Sounds like you need more RAM. Basically the game is swapping data files and such, since it can't hold it all in ram, it loads and unloads stuff to the HDD. Reason Ram disk fixes the problem is that all the swapping is done to the ram disk which is much faster than HDD. Although you would think 300mb ram would be enough for most stuff. Only thing I can think of as to why your drive goes nutz while playing. Not sure how big the client gets, but I bet it will take all it can get and then some.
[ This Message was edited by: swood on 2002-08-03 16:50 ]
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Faustus
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Palestar
Joined: May 29, 2001
Posts: 2748
From: Austin, Texas
| Posted: 2002-08-23 07:32
FYI... this thread was way back in march, it has already been fixed in code..
I was flushing to disk after each write to trace.log, which was causing the disk thrashing. I removed the flush.
-Richard
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Chromix
Cadet
Joined: June 29, 2001
Posts: 3052
| Posted: 2002-08-23 07:38
Ah.. now THAT is why the gamecq logs are incomplete after my PC crashed... I wondered the whole time what might´ve been causing it as it worked fine before 
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Deleted
Cadet
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| Posted: 2002-08-23 16:03
After my post that start 'wow' I id actually download and try the game and it wasn't happening anymore. So it looks like faustus is right (as always, I mean it is his code after all). Thanks for all the help though. I guess due to me disabling my write cashing (for data security purposes) an the fact that it's writing to the log it added up to major slow own when things were happening around me.
Anyway, all is well now and you never know, I may give in after this long and actually pay for the game. Though even if I pay I'll still just build planets all the time anyway, so what's the point
Traciatim
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