PC upgrade time?

[Puzz3D]

Thanks for the info. looks like its time to spend my heard earned cash.....being scotish it always hurts to take the wallet out

It looks to me like you might be going overboard on the graphics card and end up with a system bottlenecked with that celeron 2 GH cpu. Celeron's don't use as much L2 cache memory, and are therefore less efficient at processing program instructions. The chip itself has the same L2 cache as a Pentium, but Intel disables some of it so that the cpu doesn't perform as well. It's worth checking out if you can upgrade to a Pentium IV. Often, you can't because of changes in the cpu socket type or the voltage regulator required which is on the mainboard.

The move to 1 GB of system RAM is ok although you can get by with 512 MB. Having extra memory doesn't help performance if it's not used. RTW/BI does have a memory leak, so 1 GB RAM will allow you to play longer before the inevitable slowdown sets in, and, if you like to run other programs while you are playing RTW/BI, it will also help.

As far as I know there is no game that uses even as much as 128 MB of video RAM, and video RAM is very expensive. So, you could save a lot on the video card without degrading the performance of the game at all by getting the same video card with 128 MB of video memory. At least price it out, and then decide.

Slow map scrolling is probably the result of running out of system RAM (physical memory) so that some of the map ends up being stored in the pagefile (virtual memory). Getting information out of the pagefile back into system RAM is a very slow process compared to already having it in system RAM. When I run RTW and all of the map is in system RAM, I have no problem scrolling it. If I minimize RTW and come back to it later, WinXP has moved the entire map into the pagefile to free up RAM. I have to scroll over the entire map, which stalls repeatedly, until the whole map is read back into system RAM, and then it's fine.