One trick to improve stability and performance

[Spocky]

I discovered this last year while playing CK . Paradox games are really more stable if running on a fully defragmented hardrive. This helped me with CK and maybe also helpfull with HOI II.

Aditionally check the fragmentation of your windows swap file. Set one size ( e.g 1024 MB) and not a dynamic size and guarantee that the file is in one piece on your harddrive

hope , this information is helpfull for someone

Spocky

 

[Castellon]

Always good to keep the fragmentation down.

 

[The Boss]

Yeah I remember back when Doom 3 came out one of the developers recommended defragging before installing their game

 

[Castellon]

Every program recommends that, it is a general principle of hard drives.
However it is becomming less and less important.
The operating/Harddrives are becoming better at it, and their speed and on board caching meen there is little difference now.

 

[Orthank]

But if somone use Norton Speed disk...

 

[Castellon]

I stay away from anything to do with Norton.

 

[unmerged(25476)]

I stay away from anything to do with Norton.

true... but compared with the monstrosity that McAfee tires to pawn off as functioning software...

needless to say the two biggest Virus protection sofware developers definately take after Microsoft...

it would be nice if some software developers would actually think about designing thier products to use MINIMUN amount resources rather than go at it with the attitude of what they think they can get away with...

 

[Castellon]

I stay away from McAfee as well.

 

[unmerged(38395)]

I stay away from McAfee as well.

Yep Mcafee and Norton are worse than the viruses they claim to protect you from. I use the FREE Avast virus scanner and Executive Software Diskkeeper(not free) Haven't had a single problem yet...

btw I am in no way affiliated with any of these companies, just so you know

 

[unmerged(19775)]

Mcafee I always thought was dreck. If you're looking for a good defrag utility, try executive software's diskeeper. Used it for years, very good program. The disk defrag program that comes bundled with windreck is the "lite" version of diskeeper.

As for the single size page file, very good advice. Also, if you've got the space on your drive, you might want to set up another partition and move your page file there. Or if, like most folks, you have more than one drive on your system just move it to one of those. As long as it's off the "C" drive. This will give you an incremental increase in page hit speed amongst other things.
Depending on the windreck version, you might also want to set a single size for the registry as well. I've always thought the 50MB size was way adequate.

There are numerous tricks to speed up and streamline windows. Those are three I can remember off the top of my head. Just don't get me started on the services windows starts when it boots!

Bob

 

[Castellon]

Some of my views differ from yours.