Hard Drive Going Ape S_it!

T

Totoro

Chieftain
Joined
Jan 1, 2003
Messages
11
Location
Toronto, Up North Eh!
Since installing and play CivIV, my hard drive has never really had a moment where it stopped cranking, even outside of the game.

The thing is constantly whirling, slowing everything else down.

When when I right-click on the desktop to pull up the display properties, it whirls for about 15 seconds before the menu pops up. Same also when I pass my mouse pointer over a menu item on my start menu- whirl for 5 secs before the item is highlighted.

what did CivIV do to my system? does anybody else have this problem?

AMD Athlon 3400, 1.00GB RAM, Radeon 9600 with 128MB

all other games prior to CivIV ran great (HL2, Brothers in Arms, Dungeon Siege, etc) you figure a turn-based game wouldn't bring my PC down...

Please help. is there a solution short of re-formatting? i've done the perfunctory defrag and disk-fix

Please help!!
 
Try defragging it yet?

1. Right Start -> Explore
2. Right Click -> Local Disk (whatever you call it) -> Properties
3. Click tools tab
4. Defragment
 
"does anybody else have this problem?"

Yes I have a similar problem. But the hard drive access slowdown doesn't hit me until later in the game. Early on it's smooth sailing but as my world gets more developed it really, really starts chugging. Around 1900 the HD is buzzing constantly, really really slowing the game's performance down. And also I don't seem to have as many HD issues outside the game as you do, just in the game.

I can't even scroll the map without waiting 5 minutes. Very frustrating.

And I went to defrag but a message poped up saying my HD was fine and didn't need the defrag.

My system specs...

win xp
2.66 p4
512 MB memory
128 MB nx 6600GT

I just ordered a 512 MB stick of memory for my computer, that should be coming tommorow. Hopefully that will help.

But ATM, this HD stuff stinks!
 
I'm noticing a somewhat similar problem, although mine has nothing to do with the in-game performance.

After I've played a ways into the game, say around the time I get to the 1800s, if I exit the game and go to open up any window and then attempt to drag it around the window will sluggishly move around the path on which it was drug, normally taking 15 - 20 seconds to complete a five second manuever. I tried leaving my computer for a half hour and coming back to it only to see the same problem. The only way I can fix this is by a restart of the system.

It has nothing to do with overheating as I have had this with both my case open and shut (temperatures hovering between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius). Nor does this have anything to do with needing to defragment my system. I did that two days ago and just checked it. My drive fragmentation a combined 2% of 325GB.

My system specs:

3.0GHz P4 OC'd to 3.6GHz
128MB Radeon 9800Pro
1024MB Corsair Low Latency Dual Channel RAM
74GB WD Raptor HDD
Windows XP SP2
 
The constant hard drive usage could likely be related to the memory leak. I've seen several users post of the system consuming large amounts of virtual memory (paging file on disk) as the game progresses.

It would seem to make sense that as it exhausts the system RAM the system begins a swapping frenzy trying to keep up.

Shepherdboy
 
With 1G of RAM you shouldn't see that much paging.

Definitely defrag and set your virtual memory to a fixed size (custom with min=max).
 
On thing that might help (2 actually);

1) go www.sysinternals and search for a file in the utilities section called page defrag. It can allow you to defrag your page file/

2) What other people say about setting the page file size to a set value is good. Make it even better by putting your pagefile on it's own partition.

hope this helps a bit.

Tom
 
My pagefile is set to an initial size of 2mb and a maximum size of 128mb. I chose this because Windows is notorious for not keeping programs in the RAM and loading them in the pagefile. I haven't yet had a chance to test the game with these new settings, I will be doing that when I get out of class in around two hours. If there is a noticable change in post-game behavior I will try it with NO pagefile and see if that improves matters any more.
 
H0K135 said:
My pagefile is set to an initial size of 2mb and a maximum size of 128mb. I chose this because Windows is notorious for not keeping programs in the RAM and loading them in the pagefile. I haven't yet had a chance to test the game with these new settings, I will be doing that when I get out of class in around two hours. If there is a noticable change in post-game behavior I will try it with NO pagefile and see if that improves matters any more.
Click to expand...

I'm no expert on the pagefile, but that sounds like a really small pagefile size for 1GB of RAM. I could see Windows attempting to page things into the 128MB file and constantly swap in and out due to the small size. Perhpas someone with some real knowledge could refute that and explain it well.

Shepherdboy
 
Shepherdboy said:
I'm no expert on the pagefile, but that sounds like a really small pagefile size for 1GB of RAM. I could see Windows attempting to page things into the 128MB file and constantly swap in and out due to the small size. Perhpas someone with some real knowledge could refute that and explain it well.

Shepherdboy
Click to expand...
You are correct. That is an insanely small pagefile for 1GB of RAM, the recommended size is 1536MB if I recall correctly. The thing is, however, I am about 300MB shy of even getting into the pagefile while playing Civ4 and under normal usage I am roughly 700MB shy. I don't know how FarCry or FEAR will react to this, so that is next on my list.

Now I'm off to test how Civ4 reacts to my mini-pagefile.

edit:

Civ4 doesn't like mini-pagefiles. It crashed right after loading (which I had just about expected it to), :lol:
 
Also on top of fragmenting if your hard disk is really full that can slow things down. Also as computers get older and hard disks get used more and more they start slow down, though the amount you're talking about is a bit ridiculous. If you have the time you could wipe the drive and reinstall windows and that should speed things back up but most people don't have the time for that. Also check the virtual memory thing it can eat up a lot of hard drive space and also really start fragmenting it pretty badly.
 
You could have alot of programs running in the background that you should really disable. With 1gb of ram you should'nt have a problem. I know I don't.

Go to run and type msconfig and then go to the startup tab. Uncheck anything that does'nt need to startup with your computer.

Defrag and do a disk cleanup.

If none of that works I would go for the format. Windows fills up with alot of junk as time goes by and the only way to get rid of all of it without hosing your computer is to just format and reinstall. I do this about every 4 months to keep my computer running it's best. It helps alot.
 
Just so you know, you're talking to an ex-Computer Science major. I know my way around computers very well, msconfig and defragging are very basic; I defrag weekly and reformat at the end of each semester. My computer is brand new, I just built it two months ago; it is nothing to do with aging hardware. Oh, about the hard drive speed thing, I don't know if you know this but the WD Raptor is a 10,000RPM drive, it is faster than most every other drive out there.

I moved the pagefile to my second HDD and everything seems to be going fine. I just played an epic game up to the 1800s and quit to see if I got the window movement slowdown problem I was having before and everything seems fine. If you have two HDDs your pagefile should be on the non windows drive anyways. I'm fairly sure moving the pagefile corrected that problem, I could be wrong though.
 
In general, you will want to make sure that your harddrive always has at least 10% of free space. The fuller it gets, the slower your system will respond, and the bigger the chance your harddrive will be fragmented. If Civ 4 installed itself on clusters that are located all over the disc because of fragmentation, you may want to do a full defrag overnight or something.
 
Same problem here. I didnt mess with the page file though cause I think with 2 gigs of ram the recommended 1500meg pagefile should fit in it fine. Its installed on a drive that is barely used.
 
in my experience, a good rule of thumb on PF, is not on root drive, and 1.5x larger. i ran with no PF for a while on 2gb of ram, saw little to no performance change. but i figure that unless you hvae 2-4gb or fast ram, i wouldnt go less than 1.5 times if you want to enjoy civ 4
 
Does the game in itself speed up fragmententation of your harddrive?

I've defragged. Then two days later I ran it trough analysis and it was again very fragmented. So I defragged again.

Do you have to defrag every week?
 
Played Civ4 with 512 megs ram and I had disk-swapping mania like many people. Threw in another gig of ram and the disk swapping went away but the game was still horribly slow (not just graphically).... 3 Ghz P4 so it's not a processor issue either. I expect there's just some really inefficient code somewhere... i don't understand how it can take 3+ seconds to load up a city screen considering how little data is actually needing to be accessed to display it. Must just be a poorly designed data structure and cacheing system or something.
 
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