More Awesome Than You!

I just installed Win7, on a fabulous new laptop.

I noticed that my load times for a 2.5 Gig downloads folder is around 10 minutes~!!!!!  :o
My old P2 computer loads faster!

Anyway, I heard that it has to do with the game being made pre-dual core computers? Does anyone know a tweak I could do to speed up game load times?

Here are my specs:

Microprocessor 2.20 GHz AMD Turion X2 RM-75 Dual-Core Mobile Processor
Microprocessor Cache 1MB L2 Cache
Memory 4096MB
Memory Max 8192MB
Video Graphics ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics RS780M
Video Memory Up to 1918MB
Hard Drive 320GB (5400RPM)


Thanks!

Your problem is having a 2.5 GB download folder. Start deleting! That much CC in a game is simply unreal, it is not even possible for a sim to WEAR that much CC. If your neighborhood had 30 famblies averaging 6 people apiece, each of which wears 10 megs of CC EACH, that's still only 1.8, and this is an ENORMOUS neighborhood. A more conservative neighborhood estimate would be about half that with half as much CC.

 :D

None of it is bodyshop content. 

I just noticed it takes same amount of time to load with same amount of content on a new machine vs. a P2 machine with less than a gig memory, thought maybe I could tweak what loads like I did XP.

I have 3.7 GB of files in the Downloads folder, and it doesn't take nearly that long to load the game (in Win XP Pro SP3, although I don't think that matters in this instance). Not all 3.7 GB is active at any given time (only about 1 GB is clothing, including meshes), but there is still more stuff than you report. This is on a desktop; it would take forever to load the same stuff on my old laptop with 1.8 GHz Pentium M ("Dothan") and a 5400-rpm hard drive, from 2005.

Two things stand out as likely bottlenecks in your machine. The CPU is rather underpowered by today's standards (probably designed more for power savings and low heat than performance), and the hard drive is also slow (fast laptop drives are 7200 rpm). Both of these will have a significant affect on your load times.

Sorry!

Also, note that the HD 3200 RS780M graphics controller is integrated with the motherboard, and uses the system RAM instead of having its own dedicated RAM. This is why the spec states "up to" 1918 MB of RAM—it will use as much system RAM as you can feed it, up to that maximum amount.

So turning off the desktop and such are the only tweaks until I can upgrade the mem to 8 gb?

Thanks that is the information I was seeking!

That probably will not make a difference. The load time is determined by how fast the hard drive can feed data to the CPU, and how fast the CPU can process the instructions it receives.

If you want to REALLY boost your load times, get a metric fuckton of RAM and install the entire mess to RAMdisk. At this point your computer will stop touching the hard drives entirely when starting your game, and all your loading should become lightning fast. The drawbacks? Should you do something stupid and cause your computer to lose power or crash before it can dump out to permanent storage, say goodbye to your game.

Metric fuckton? That's a Dexter quote.

Well, it's a bit less than an Imperial fuckton, but otherwise works about the same.