For some reason, I find that as the % of the hard drive space is occupied, system performance altogether seems to drop. Clear up any unused space or uneeded files/folders and make sure you have no virus' or spyware. You really shouldn't be needing anymore RAM with that setup, but if you feel that's what you need obviously go right ahead.

Orion_Antares, the game has always exceeded 512MB RAM usage. In my early vanilla AoM days (when vanilla had just been released) I used to have only 512MB, too. As your tests also indicate, memory usage is approximately 512MB, so there is not much of a shortage, and the game is playable with that amount of RAM. However, I did encounter some disk swapping when I clicked on the minimap in order to jump to a totally different location on the map, a location where I had not been to for some time. It especially appeared to happen later in the game, with more units and more action on the map.

So no, it is not a new issue. However, since 512MB are only slightly exceeded by the game, it is usually playable with that amount of RAM. Needless to say that HDD speed plays a role here. Disabling any virus scanner before starting to play is a good idea with regard to memory usage, and especially since HDD accesses get much faster that way.

However, what you are doing with your friend's machine is too much from the AoM standpoint. Either replacing the HDD or adding RAM would have sufficed. A reliable and fast HDD (as well as removing programs from being auto-loaded at bootup) should be sufficient for him to play the game. More memory will make the game experience perfect, but is not necessary under these circumstances (a matter of money).

On the other hand, if he does add RAM, then HDD speed becomes pretty unimportant other than for initially loading the game. By the way, increased noise from his hard disk is not a technical reason to replace it, unless it is the racket itself that troubles your friend. Many hard disks tend to become noisier as they age. Especially Maxtor drives are known for this effect. Unless you hear noises that indicate a head crash (like small clicking noises that clearly differ from the normal head movement noises), there is no need to replace the HDD. You can always use the S.M.A.R.T. feature that everys modern HDD supports in order to monitor the health of the drive.

Quoted from Orion_Antares:

Being a systems administrator, I can assure you that your approach is not really helpful to make your system more reliable (except the Norton software for defense against hacker and virus attacks). What you are doing are fancy performance tweaks of very arguable efficiency. If you want to make sure your system is always ready for your work, then there is no alternative to a decent backup solution, a solution that does include creating a HDD image with a software like Symantec Ghost (good up to version 8.0, but not later) or TrueImage. You need a method to quickly get your system up and running in case your windows installation is somehow ruined - or if you encounter a HDD crash (after all the most likely of all possible hardware failures). If you have a proper image in the drawer and a recent backup of your working data, you can get your system up and running within minutes no matter what kind of crash you encounter after replacing any defective hardware, that is.

Quoted from Brtnboarder495:

Yes. The reason is that HDDs begin storing data on the outer areas of their physical disks, where they are fastest. They grow slower in the inner areas, which are used as the HDD fills up. There is no technical need for the manufacturer to follow this policy, since block addresses are only logical today, but still all manufacturers do it that way.

This detail can be used for smart system partitioning. I am running my Windows XP from a 2GB FAT16 partition at the beginning of my HDD. No matter how much my hard disk fills up, the files that are used for Windows will always reside in the first (fastest) 2GB. Using FAT16 here means even more improved performance, as the whole file allocation table never exceeds 128kB with FAT16 and can therefore be held in the RAM all the time. The rest of the HDD is occupied by a large data partition, where the less often used files (all the games and other data) are stored. You know the fancy bar that moves from the left to the right during bootup of Windows XP. On my machine, it moves once from the left to the right, and then perhaps another 20% of the bar, then Windows XP is already booted up.

Btw, I am using a Radeon 9600 (non-pro), and the game plays just fine. I remember using a Radeon 9000, but I had slight performance issues with that one, and the graphics was less beautiful since it did not fully support the DirectX 9 features.

DeathAndPain,

Thanks for the tips!

At aprox 5 mins into the test games, the RAM usage reached 512MB, but it didn't stop there. At 15 mins it was close to 600MB and still slowly but steadily climbing. I didn't test it any further as I felt that I'd found my friends problem.

Quote:

Yes, of course. All my work files are backed up daily to an off site location, can't afford to lose them. Part of my cable internet package is a large personal storage area on the providers’ servers.

My system "tune up" and "clean up" routines also help to remove any innocuous files that I might accidentally send to a customer, bad news for business!

Quoted from Orion_Antares:

Which is hopefully backed up by the provider. However, note that a professional backup solution includes holding several versions of the data in a cascaded manner. For instance, if you back up to a tape device, you could have a tape for monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday. You further have tapes for the first, second, and third week of the month. These tapes are inserted on Friday and hold a weekly backup. At the fourth friday of every month, you insert a monthly tape for the current month. You can continue with yearly or half-yearly backups, depending on your needs.

This approach is usual in professional environments. It protects your data not only from hardware failures, but also from human errors and software accidents. For instance, you may have accidentally deleted a folder that holds important information (or a program on your computer may have done so). However, you do not need that folder for a few days or even weeks, and when you notice, the deletion has already expanded into your backup. Another scenario would be undesirable modification of your data by whatever cause, a slight modification perhaps that you do not recognize right away. All these scenarios can only be protected against by a proper cascaded backup as I just described. You can, of course, choose your provider's backup space and store several data versions there (if it is large enough), but that leaves you with the task to manually select a proper directory for the backup every day and manually organize the backups. An administrator will always desire a single backup medium (tape, DVD, or whatever) in his hands, knowing that whatever happens to the hardware, from a simple HDD crash over a broken water pipe to a large fire, he will always be able to quickly restore all data as soon as he has regained working hardware.