Does EB corrupt over time?

[Tiberius Claudius Marcellus]

The other day I had asked for help re: sprite issues w/ spear/cavalry units. After reinstalling windows, RTW, EB 1.1 and 1.2 and the fixes (no sub-mods), as well as updating my video card drivers I booted up EB and was greeted by a fast and furious loading screen. All unit images were clean and crisp.

However, less than a week later the game takes longer and longer to load each time I play and I'm back to floating helmets/limbs in the middle of marching shields/ horse torsos. These negative effects appear to be cumulative, as starting a new campaign / erasing saved games does not solve the problem.

With this new install of windows et al., I've got no viri, malware, corrupt sectors, and I don't need to defragment. Does anyone else have performance issues that become worse over time? Do I just have a bad version of EB?

[bovi]

Perhaps you should restart your computer to unfragment your memory? I don't know anything else that could make it deteriorate like this.

[Tiberius Claudius Marcellus]

Perhaps you should restart your computer to unfragment your memory? I don't know anything else that could make it deteriorate like this.

Sorry, I thought that went without saying. Restarting / defragmenting the hard drive were the first things that I did. No dice, though.

[LordCurlyton]

Sorry man, can't help you. If anything, my EB has gotten slightly faster over time, though I credit that to adding more RAM than anything else. What's the specs on your machine? Maybe we can glean something from that.

[Tiberius Claudius Marcellus]

Nothing too fancy:

CPU: AMD Athalon 64 3500 + (PCI not AM2)
Video Card: ATI Radeon Xpress 200 series (integrated) - yeah, I know
RAM: 960 MB

But this is enough to run Huge scale battles w/ medium unit graphics and low terrain graphics w/out a problem.

[LordCurlyton]

Hmmm, what version of Windows? XP? Perhaps the new drivers are not as stable with your setup?
I ask about Windows b/c I noticed that every now and then (and this was very rarely) XP, when I had it, would decide that it just plain did not like something about a program and slowly corrode it. Do not ask me how or why or what, eventually it would just be corrupted and those error reports always said it was a driver conflict or such, not that I was ever able to find one/figure it out. Maybe the card or memory is just getting old? Especially the memory if its not ECC (EEC? I always forget) buffered, in which case you start to accumulate an unavoidable amount of memory errors over time, though that should rarely become an issue with anyone unless it hits a critical section. I know that with my old computer I wore out my Ti 4200 video card to where it just plain could not function properly (I also think it got slightly unhinged, preventing it from cooling properly).
And of course it may just be a bad download of EB. That's the only real risk you run on occasion when using a torrent download. Shame there wasn't anyone seeding still basically when I got my new comp, but I can vouch for the integrity of the ftp download.

[Tiberius Claudius Marcellus]

I'm running Windows XP Home Edition, and again, just reinstalled it before I reinstalled EB in an attempt to solve my video problem last time (time lapse of less than 2 weeks). I'm not downloading pr0n or anything else to slow me down and AVG 8.?? / Spybot Search and Destroy are consistently coming up clean.

The computer is over 3 years old and I suppose it certainly could be degrading memory. I think I'm going to try a new download of EB and see if that works. If not, it's time to buy a new machine.

Thanks for your input.

[bovi]

And of course it may just be a bad download of EB. That's the only real risk you run on occasion when using a torrent download. Shame there wasn't anyone seeding still basically when I got my new comp, but I can vouch for the integrity of the ftp download.
This is wrong. The integrity of a torrent download is 100% (each part is checked for corruption and redownloaded if necessary), while a regular download is far more likely to be corrupted. There are also at least 11 seeds for both 1.1 and 1.2 when I checked today.

[LordCurlyton]

Maybe it was just bad timing for me but I had precisely 0 seeders after I had my new computer several months ago. Pre-1.2 mind you, so 1.1 had been out for a while and likely everyone who wanted it had it. Hell, maybe everyone just happened to be asleep and turned their computers off. But that was the case with me. And since I downloaded the ftp at almost 1.5Mb/s (I love you FIOS + Gamefuel router) I wasn't exactly concerned.
To wit, I HAVE gotten bad downloads from the torrent before. It does check for integrity of each hash, but if the data that the hash is sending is already bad (i.e. it would be a crappy download anyways) then the integrity check will do little to help you. In my personal experience you generally should be cautious if a certain section of the whole download gets spread into many small pieces that download slowly. Those people generally send crap on any DL service. I will give torrent its due though, as it has, FAR more often than not, put together successful downloads from that. Never will forget the time I couldn't complete a torrent b/c no one had a certain section of the whole though...

[The Persian Cataphract]

I will be seeding both versions 1.1 and 1.2 for an indefinite time, so given the right timing, these downloads will always have at least one seeder.