Hi everyone.
I've just bought a new laptop with not bad specs but Civ4 Warlords is quite jerky, which really surprised me.
My specs are...
Intel Duo Core 2.2Ghz
512mb NVIDIA GeForce 9500M GS
4GB RAM
Any ideas how I can improve performance?
You're right; that kind of system should give you very good performance, considering that Civ4 is getting to be pretty old now. My girlfriend's netbook has stats about half as good as that (1.8 GHz Atom processor, 9300M, and 2GB RAM), and it plays Civ4 rather acceptably, when some of the graphics options are turned down.
My first suggestion would be to make sure that you're using the latest drivers for your hardware. Ignore the vendor's driver download page (it's always out of date) and go directly to
Nvidia's web page. Download the latest driver available for your hardware. Follow all of the directions.
Next, I would suggest that you make sure that you set your power plan to "performance", rather than "power saver" or "balanced". This will greatly impact your battery life, so I'd also recommend that you have AC power available. Sometimes the different power plans default to pretty much the same options, except for display brightness, but you never know what your vendor has tweaked.
Finally, make sure that you don't have lots of applications running in the background, soaking up all your valuable RAM and processor time. Unfortunately, most vendors preload their systems with mountains of useless software, trial versions, and demos. Personally, the first thing I do when I see any Norton software is uninstall it. It's total crap.
