(firstpostmode) Hello everyone! (/firstpostmode)

I'm running EB on an old (very old!) Evo N1020v Compaq laptop, which due to a 32 mb graphics card shouldn't even be able to drag along vanilla RTW (not to mention the idiotic 224 mb RAM instead of 256), according to CA. It's probably apparent that I've done everything I can to squeeze all the performance I can get of this scrap metal ;>
It runs very poorly on my machine, but it's bearable, I just read a book while playing EB and waiting for a battle to load or a turn to end.
I can advise a couple more things not present in the first post which I found useful:

1. If you don't want to mess with your services by yourself (and you shouldn't if you have the feeling you don't know what you're doing) there's a free app - engelmann game tuner (google it) -
which does this (and a couple of other things, including setting the optimum page file size) for you, and makes a convenient backup file so that you can switch between gaming and casual configs at ease. I use it now, works good.

2. Quit explorer before starting EB. Seems obvious that you don't use it while playing; the sinister explorer insists however on eating up your RAM and CPU. To do this start task manager, select explorer and quit the process. Then select "run" from the file menu, and choose EB. Be sure to quit the task manager as soon as you click OK, otherwise you'll have it running in the background, possibly eating more resources than explorer.
When you finish playing you'll be presented with a pitch black screen. Simply open the task manager again, and in the run prompt type in "explorer".

3. Revert to old sea graphics with a thingie available from EB website, section downloads/misc
(weird that it hasn't been mentioned, the new sea nearly gagged my ol' PC.)

And a question to the modders - is it possible to replace the campaign map animations with static ones? Seeing as how the new sea graphic caused a considerable performance hit, I wonder if the EB developers could release a replacement for the animated sea, trees etc. replacing them with more static ones. For me at least it would be a minor thing - I don't care for eye candy - and it could improve performance, maybe even decrease loading times. I presume that more people would be interested in this sort of thing, and it shouldn't be very difficult.