Takes five minutes to load

[Minor Annoyance]

Recently in another discussion someone mentioned the 30 seconds it takes Civ4: BTS to start, which I found surprising since mine takes five minutes. Also in a discussion about how long a game lasts people who play marathon on a huge map who say the like to micromanage were finishing in half the time it takes me to play out a normal speed, standard sized map. So obviously something is slow with my computer. Here's what I'm running:
Pentium 4 1.6GHz, 512 MB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 graphics card. I can't find where it will tell me how much video ram I have.
The easiest and cheapest thing to upgrade would be the RAM, so will that work or is something else slowing it down?

 

[Sam_Yeager]

To be honest your system is pretty much at the lower end of what Civ4 will run on. There's a sticky in this forum about TnL graphics and the FX 5200 ranks towards the bottom of what's required. If you have the money I would suggest getting a better spec computer.

That said, Civ4 definitely runs better with more memory so that would be a good choice if you can't afford a better computer anytime soon. Next would be getting a better graphics card. See the sticky in this forum for ideas on that front.

Running dxdiag may show how much memory your graphics card has but I'm not certain if that is the case.