Unbearably slow loadup times

[qmanjr5]

So, I've been having troubles since I got AI War (v5) along with it's expansions. The game takes upwards of a minute to load, and not JUST the first time. I've tried defragging, and I just reinstalled. Neither work.
Anyone else have/gotten this problem, and if so, how did you fix it?

[keith.lamothe]

Is this a problem that you didn't experience in 4.021?

[x4000]

Is the program itself being really slow to load, or is this happening when you are loading a savegame?

Are you sure there's nothing else competing for your disk at the time?  If you're doing something else that is accessing the disk a lot, then it may be blocking AI War and making it slower.  The game is primarily loading a bunch of stuff from disk during program start, anyway.

[qmanjr5]

Is this a problem that you didn't experience in 4.021?

I've experienced it in earlier versions, yes.

[qmanjr5]

Is the program itself being really slow to load, or is this happening when you are loading a savegame?

Are you sure there's nothing else competing for your disk at the time?  If you're doing something else that is accessing the disk a lot, then it may be blocking AI War and making it slower.  The game is primarily loading a bunch of stuff from disk during program start, anyway.

It's the program. And, nothing else is significantly accessing my disk. Perhaps...would my RAM have ANYTHING to do with this? I have 1GB, as my other 1GB isn't registering, and I haven't had any problems, so I'd not opened up computer to fix it. If that even hints that it would cause this obnoxious wait, then I'll have to.

[x4000]

This isn't a known issue with the game. Without more info about what is actually happening and when, there is not much we can do. What is happening on the screen during this time that it is spending?

What is your RAM usage like at the time? Any chance a bunch of other stuff is being sent to swap? If you have 4th of ram with 3gb in use, and you load AI War, the OS is going to have to do some shuffling for a bit.

For that matter, what OS are you on? What kind of hardware? If the hardware is sufficiently old, 1 minute might not be that crazy, but on very new hardware it ought to be more like 20 seconds.

EDIT: Ninja'd! Yes, having only 1gb of RAM would 100% definitely cause this. On load, the game will use about 800mb. That is more than is likely to be free even if you just booted your os, so that means all that waiting is indeed the OS shuffling stuff over into swap. If the other stick of ram is in place but not registering right, then you might be having some bus problems too. You can definitely playthe game with 1gb of ram, and it should perform fine once you get the game up unless you play a very large campaign, but it will load much slower with that little of ram.