game is continuously lagging, but i have an excellent computer

[Nathaniel Wolfson]

Originally Posted by indeedturtle

i have a Geforce 7150 in my laptop, and although it does share memory with the HD, it should still play this game flawlessly, also I don't have anything on in the background and every setting is on its lowest

Okay, the 7150 relies ENTIRELY on system memory. This means it's performance is going to be a great deal lower that solutions with dedicated graphics memory, especially once you start raising resolution. Additionally it has to compete with other devices demanding memory access (which can also cause slowdowns in-game if the system becomes I/O-bound).

The system may play the game flawlessly...at a lower res, or at a lower setting.

Check the memory management in the game to see if it's default or aggressive. Make SURE it's default. Aggressive slows down the memory leaks, but causes horrible performance dropoffs.

Vista is also another culprit. It's system demands are MUCH higher than XP. Some games display as much as a 20% performance dropoff simply due to running XP vs Vista. Some of this has to do with Vista's memory management. Vista tries to push as much as possible into memory and hopes that it gets the stuff you NEED in there. XP used to simply shove what you were doing into memory and tried to keep memory relatively empty otherwise.

In time, Vista is supposed to learn your usage patterns and performance can pick up as it caches more intelligently. But in the main, when it needs to push something into RAM that isn't already there, it's slower, since it has to flush a portion of the RAM back to disk, THEN load the stuff into memory.

You can aleviate this a little bit by turning down settings in Windows itself, turning off things like a lot of the desktop eyecandy, optimizing for best performance, etc.

Also, how much memory do you have? I know the BS they push about needing 512MB or more. REALISTICALLY, you want as much RAM as you can throw at Vista (with 2GB being a realistic minimum). A guildmate of mine had a system with 512MB of RAM and Vista. She simply couldn't do things in-game because she was memory limited.

Once I found this out I recommended she upgrade to 2GB (the maximum her system would take). She did and it was like she'd gotten a new machine. Vista suddenly became MUCH better behaved, and the game started functioning properly for her.

If Compaq had produced XP drivers for her particular model, I'd have recommended "upgrading" to XP to her too. Unfortunately they didn't.

If you're not at 2GB, I'd suggest spending the money to upgrade to at least that. Luckily for you, memory is comparatively dirt cheap compared to what it's been in the past few years. You could, conceivably max out your system for less than $200 (possibly less than $100).

Another possiblity is that you have a much slower hard drive. Currently hard drives are mainly produced in 3 speeds for laptops, with the speeds representing how fast they rotate (in rpms).

Quick breakdown on relative speeds.

Data that's on the CPU is usually being moved as fast as the computer can conceivably move it.

A step down from there is your memory. Usually the memory is running anywhere from 80-10% of your CPU speed. Meaning that the CPU has to sit idle for a certain number of ticks of it's internal clock before it gets the data.

From there, you have another step-down to the hard drive cache. The hard drive cache can be running anywhere from 100-10% of your system memory speeds.

From there we step down again, BIGTIME, to data actually on the platter of your hard drive. Retrieval times of data in this state are literally 500-1000x slower than disk cache or system memory. Meaning your CPU can spend many MANY clock ticks waiting for data.

Okay back to drives.

4200 rpm drives are the slowest. Fore the most part, they suck the least power, but that power savings translates into low performance.

Next up are 5400 rpm drives. They're a better balance (usually) of performance and power consumption and come in fairly large sizes They eat a little more power than the 4200 rpm drives, but the performance jump MORE than offsets the reduced battery time.

Finally we come to 7200 rpm drives. These are the fastest drives you can get in a laptop for the most part. These suck the most power, and tend not to have quite as much capacity as the 5400 rpm or 4200 rpm drives. They're also the most expensive. These drives can drastically decrease battery time, but when it comes to disk performance in a laptop they have no substitute.

Desktop systems have two additional speed grades. 10,000 rpm and 15,000 rpm (and Western Digital is working on 20,000 rpm as we speak). These drives are much more expensive in specific cases, can deliver incredible peformance that simply can't be matched by slower drives (though some slower drives with big caches can close the gap a LOT).

That's the next thing, you want to look for drives with larger caches. Caches on a hard drive allow the hard drive to have data ready when the system asks for it without having to drop back down to physically reading the platters. In some cases, when the caching works well, this can lead to drastic reductions in the time it takes to get data from a drive. Usually, the more cache on a drive you have, the better. In a lot of cases, a slower drive can compete seriously with a faster drive with half the cache.

The largest caches on laptop drives right now are about 16MB with 8 being the norm.
The largest caches on desktop drives right now are about 32MB with 8-16 being the norm.

So, in short:

Optimize Windows when you can. If this is an HP/Compaq machine, very likely you can't put XP on it.
Optimize the game when you can.
Put as much memory into the system as it'll take.
Think about a faster hard drive with a large cache.