Should this help?

I'm adding a 320 gig hard drive to go with the 120 gig I've got now and an addition 512Meg if ram to bring the total up to 1 gig of system ram. Running a 2.4 Pentium 4 and 9700 ATI Pro Video card. Should this help my super slow response times past about 1900?

 

What do you mean by that response time? The addition of hard disk shouldn't help very much the overall performance. However, that way you can add more virtual memory and your hard disk shouldn't get fragmented so easily anymore. The increase of RAM should help very much.

 

The 120 is getting pretty full right now (about 95% full) so I can move quite a bit of stuff off of it to the new drive. I'm thinking that adding more ram and more HD should keep it from switching to virtual ram as much.

 

Oh then I'd say it'll help a lot!
A full hard drive makes Windows very cranky!
Other than that, I suggest LOWERING windows' cache limit. It sucks up RAM for no particular reason and refuses to let it go!
Just MHO...
But look at this:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=149649

 

I recommend defragging both drives, especially the old one, after moving stuff over onto the new. At 95% full you're bound to have some massively chopped-up files, but defragmenting will make things right again.

 

1 gig of RAM total should work wonders, if it is high quality. My son's computer can run, at least the beginning of the game, quite well with only 256 RAM but he has a very high quality stick. (Everything he has is highquality and neat and clean, because he's a doctor and an Eagle Scout as opposed to me who am just a nosepicker from the Ozarks.) Twenty years ago RAM meant "rest at mom's." I think I need defraging. When your wife or mother is tired of you does she suggest that you go defrag your computer?

 

the videocard is important

 

The new stuff will arrive tomorrow or maybe the next day so I guess I will find out then. I will let everyone know how it works out.

 

I believe that windows requires something like 15% free space before it can defrag the hard drive, so at 5% I can't see that being possible. Hard drives generally take a major performance hit when less that 10% space is left on the drive. You should be backing stuff up well before you reach that limit.

Partitioning your hard drive is also a good idea if you wish to increase performance. My 250GB drive has 4 partitions. 10GB for windows/system files, 50GB for program files/games, 80GB for data that I download, and a remaining partition for when my first data partition starts to fill up. This allows you to defrag your system partition in no time, and keeps your programs/games partition relatively unfragmented unless you start installing more stuff on that partition. Whenever you add a new game to the games partition, a quick defragment will keep your performance in check. Whenever I play Call of Duty, I'm always the first person to join when a new map loads, and Civ4 always loads nice and quickly for me as well. All I'm running is an A64 3200+ with 512MB of RAM.