1,024 megabytes is exactly one gigabyte. Just as a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, or 1,024 kilobytes. It's based on powers of two, not ten.

how do u do this?

you need to do this manualy
 

Right click on my computer then click on properties at the bottom. Then click on the Advanced tab at the top. The line that says Performance then "visual effect's processing and so forth" click on the settings button. Then click on the tab "Advanced" at the bottom you will see a line that says "Virtual memeory" click on change button Choose the hard drive you want to add virtual memory to then highlite the custom size circle. The inicial size can not be smaller than 2mb I have mine at 250mb but the maximum size I make the same as my physicle memory installed. After your done hit the set button then okay and you have to restart your PC for it to take effect.

I hope I did this easy enough for you to understand.

:lol: Running full speed ahead no problems on my laptop http://lowendmac.com/pb/portable.shtml








lol sorry just had to add this :know: :arrgh!: (dont have a go at me, it took me ages to find a computer with those specs! :yep: )

Im running on 1 gig of ram and it is very laggy for me.

Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop

Intel Centrino Mobile

ATI Mobility Raedon X300

18.9 gig's of ROM left

Windows XP Home Edition SP2

1 Gig of RAM

I need to upgrade I think but I do not have the money to upgrade it yet if anyone has suggestions for what I should get please tell me.

tbh its probably your graphics card causing you the issue, most players have trouble with the x600 ati so the x300 isnt going to fare that well im afraid.
also if you are serious about playing the game (or others) then id suggest getting a desktop rather than a laptop

If you can donate the money for one I am ok with that:lol:

But in the meantime I have a lot of saving of money to do.

I don't know if its the RAM or not but when I start a mission it sort of freezes when i try to:
Go to Map screen
Zoom out
Zoom in
Move map around
Go to deck
Going near land

If i'm playing music the part I'm listening to will start replaying over and over. But luckily after I do everything once it doesn't lag anymore.

It did this in SH3 but not as bad as SH4

do you have a sound card or running off the mother board?
 

I knew that about the sound card, but since mine was a little old, and I have recently upgraded the motherboard to a new one with flashy 6.1 sound and all, I gave it a try... (maybe) not surprisingly, I checked 10-12 more FPS using a 6 yr old SB Live!, always. Integrated sound is only good for "marginal" use, never for 3d multichannel sound. The CPU gets the load then, and in this kind of sims we cannot afford that!

Apart from that I agree the video card is crucial, more than RAM. But then RAM is also important, and CPU, and speedy HDs...

With a fast box you won't notice the 1-2GB difference _that_ much. I know I didn't when I finished my step-by-step upgrade (ram was last). On the other hand, with a slow box, anything you improve you will notice inmediately!

my 2 bit$...

As you have discovered, everyone has their own version of good advice. This is because everyone owns a unique set of hardware and skill varies widely on optimizing that hardware set. You have to take a bit of what everyone says and try it out on your system to see what makes a difference for you. Every Main Board model has it's own unique advantages/disadvantages for manipulating memory, disk I/O etc.

My last bit of self-serving advice is after all your tweaks are done, the hardware is the limiting factor. The less RAM you have, more more careful and aggressive you have to be to make as much of it avialble to the game as possible. When you have 2 gig or more, it's less important to clear out programs as long as the ones you leave in aren't using CPU.

More RAM (both video and system) and faster CPU/GPU will provide the most noticable results. Depending on your tweaking skill the game will definately run on 1 gig on your video card, but if you want faster, smoother, you have a way to go both in tweaking and hardware to truely get unfettered performance on XP or Vista with SH4.

MONOLITH,

From my experience, with 2 gigs or more of SYSRAM, SH4 does almost no HD caching when you have 512 VRAM. All that daily defragging is only waring out your HD prematurely. Also, if you START with a defragged cache file, it does not frag over time because the system has reserved a continuous disk space for it. You can do two things to verify my claim. Watch your HD light while playing the game and keep the Task Manager Performance Tab accessible behind the game and task switch to it once in a while.

-Pv-

I'm the guy with a dead video card. So, crazy as I am, I just want to look around in the game, so I installed it on my second computer. It has an AMD 2400+, 1.25 GB of RAM.

I had the same problem. Clearly it's a RAM issue, because that desktop coming back so slowly (me, too!) means it was paged out (to the Pagefile / swapfile) because of aggressive RAM freeing, and is getting paged back in. Same with other programs. The delay between the command room and the map and the bridge is there--things have to get paged out to make more RAM for SH4.

So the tips on clearing out all the programs you can is good. When you have a list of programs, any that _don't_ sleep and stay in sleep mode (meaning, they just sit there, doing absolutely nothing), will need to get paged in. That's disk I/O, and it's slow. Then it'll get paged out again, because Windows is short on RAM and is aggressive about paging out stuff.

Programs that don't sleep: firewalls, anti-virus, system monitoring, email, browser on ESPN's scores page, etc. Do you really know what every single background service is doing? Clear 'em ALL out.


OK, I did that on my machine. Things are a lot snappier, relatively speaking. I can alt-tab out of SH4 and the desktop is right there. So you probably can get away with 1 GB of RAM, if you clear out as many programs as you can.