No longer possible to preload skins?

[33Vortex]

Did a fresh install of AH about a week ago, installed the high-res pack also. Now I can no longer select preload skins option, which really bugs me because it causes the game to mini-freeze every time a new texture a/c enter the scene.  Why is this? Preloading skins is great, it takes a while to load but makes the game run so much smoother from eliminating the mini-freezes.

Another minor issue is that the game only seem to detect 1GB of my RAM while I have 4GB. Perhaps of little relevance but still, why is this?



System specs:

Vista HP 32bit
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
4 GB Corsair DDR2 800MHz
XFX ATX nForce 780i
XFX GTX280i - SLI

[Skuzzy]

The amount of RAM we report is what the operating system tells us is available.

Do you have all the skins loaded?  If you do, there is no way your computer could have enough RAM to preload all of them.

[33Vortex]

Okay... 

When loading into a online arena before this reinstall it showed a counter, going through all the skins (yes I have all of them) loading them into memory. I did have the high-res pack installed previously too. Thought the RAM was enough to load it, as it showed a lot of mem usage in sys info (ctrl + i). Perhaps it was loaded in a page file on the hdd? Now it only loads the environment skins and apparently skip all a/c skins while the 'preload skins' option is greyed out in graphics settings menu. The system memory usage is displayed as 0 (!) no mem usage at all, while video memory is something redicilous like 16MB or something like that. Will have to check later for exact numbers. Vid memory however display a correct 2 GB.

Is there any way I can enable skin preloading again?

BTW, skins folder show slightly more than 300 MB on the hdd, how much mem is required to load all textures? I have 4GB, that should be enough no?

[Skuzzy]

The operating system does not allow applications to address enough RAM to preload all the skins with the high resolution texture pack installed.

Some part of the data space would be swapped out.

[edog1977]

Skuzzy, is preloading high res skins and textures a waste of time?