Major performance issues

[Minotaar]

Heh.. this is one of these issues where i'd love to fly over to your location and take a look at it.

Benchmark proves nothing is wrong with the drive and OS drivers (related to the drive, anyway)
The question is, have you installed some audio or graphics driver lately? What about chipset drivers.

And what USB devices do you have attached?

Well, Russia isn't that far away.. 
Actually, if you have the time to look into this, I could give you control via teamviewer, or smth like that. You can add me on Skype (minotaar) if you're interested, I would be very grateful.
As for the question, just the latest video drivers. USB devices - usual mouse/keyboard/printer/external drive, and a joystick which wasn't there when I last played, but I tried unplugging it and killing its controller program, with no results.

[keith.lamothe]

For reference I've attached my harddisk benchmark numbers.  It's also a WDC drive that's nearing full so the numbers could be better but it works just fine and loading my steam copy of AIW may take 20 seconds (from run through start-new-game to in-game) but it doesn't take 100 (My dev copy and dev environment is on my SSD where the numbers are... rather better )

Just to clarify, your C and D drive are both partitions of the same harddisk?  If they were separate (internal) drives that would tell us something.

Anyway, yea, this appears to be outside the realm of something I can armchair-troubleshoot and more into the realm of "has your computer offended someone lately?" and "have you offended your computer lately?".  Hopefully someone around here can figure out what sort electronic social gaffe led to the rift between AIW and its storage.

[Minotaar]

Yep, they are just partitions.
I would like to think of it as the AI's ultimate revenge  Too bad I didn't even win a game yet to warrant that kind of response 

[Cyborg]

Here is how I would troubleshoot:

-One of the things I would do is look at your resources page (a sub dialog of your Task Manager), and look at what the processes are doing reads and writes while your AI war is loading.

-Your benchmark is significantly slower than Keith's, which also means you should start unplugging everything from your computer except for your mouse, keyboard, and sound cables. That means no headset, no digital camera, no printer cables, no external hard drive, nothing. When a computer starts to experience delay, sometimes that is due to flooding the bus. I/O devices can do that. Imagine what happens when your virus protector starts to automatically scan an external drive.

- Shut down all processes except for those required to run AI war. This is not because your machine is too slow, but rather eliminate any suspects.