Minimizing the "screen freezes"

[Urchin]

I think I still have a problem with the screen "freezing" as it loads textures.  I saw this post by Waffle in the Technical Support forums

"1. Player-made skins: I find that these are the most common reason for the "mini-warp" or "screen freeze" when getting near another aircraft. Your PC is loading the texture and creating a cached file for EACH skin that you see. Currently there are over 500 skins and there are constantly more being added. Each time you see one of those 500+ skins for the first time - you'll get a pause / screen freeze / stutter while it loads for the first time. Also note after each release / patch you'll have these stutters/mini-warps the first time you see a new skin as it loads / creates cache.
"


What is the best way to minimize these?  Is it even possible?  Are these 'cache' files made every time you play or are they saved so that they still exist on the second, third, x-th session?

[Delirium]

Maybe I'm dead wrong, but it I first saw every skin at least once I had a mini-freeze. Now that I've been on this new computer for some time it is as smooth as a cheerleaders bottom.

[Ghosth]

First off you can disable skins. Or at least make it so your system won't show them.

Second you might try not running your texture size at the max. I typically run at least 1 notch lower.

To disable skins, esc, options, graphic detail (at the top)
Try disabling skins and weapons effects. Then see if it makes a difference.

[Denholm]

A 3.0 GB/s SATA hard drive, faster processor, faster RAM, and a better video card might resolve the issue. However that's an expensive fix for a minor hiccup.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Urchin how much ram do you have? If you have 1Gb or less, get another gig.

A free tip is to uncheck 'preload in system mem' as it's 10x slower than loading the textures to your graphics card memory. You might also want to check the box 'preload skins' This might negate the whole freezing effect.

[Fulmar]

Generally, I've noticed that when I either format my HD or reinstall AH for whatever reason...the first few times I run the game I'd get minor hiccups when encountering new planes at a distance.  I attribute this to loading the skins.  Eventually, either through defragging the hard drive or the skins getting loading into memory cache (or something), the freezes disappear.  I run everything max with 1024 textures on a C2D 2.66ghz, 8800GTS 640, 4gb ram, and RAID 0.

[Getback]

I think Skuzzy said once that when first entering the game you will get some stuttering. I've found if I go to the TA or DA first you will get a little less of this.

[Eagler]

just go with it - I use it as a SA alert now

it freezes a sec or two before I can see the dot