OK, I understand a lot of you are having issues with the new version of the game. I understand where you are at as, until about 16 months ago I was playing on a PIII 600 Mhz Dell with 512 Mb of SRAM and a 32 Mb video card. Even with that I was able to maintain frame rates from 15-35 FPS in the last version of the game so all is not hopeless. I'm going to try to give you some system maintenence and (heaven forbid...) upgrade tips.
First of all you need to reduce the number of proccesses running in the background. Don't even think about listening to MP3's or alt-tabbing out to surf the web or play with a spreadsheet while playing the game. Free all of your limited system resources to run the game. Turn off all auto-updaters. Turn off your anti-virus and other security software while playing. If you're behind a NAT firewall (router) you can also turn off your software firewall. Turn off system services you don't use (visit
www.blackviper.com for a guide to system services). If you don't know what something is Google it. There are plenty of articles that will explain what a service is and does. You need to bring all of this to a minimum. You can also use utilites such as enditall or Glary utilites to shut down un-needed applications.
Run a virus/spyware/adware/malware scan before shutting these down.
Next, do some system maintenence. Run scandisc (files and folders only) and let it repair errors. Run system clean-up. Delete whatever it finds. Go to your windows temp folder and delete whatever is there. Open your web browser and delete cookies, temporary Internet files and history. Go to add/remove programs in the control panal and delete whatever you don't use anymore. Check your documents and e-mail and get rid of what you no longer need. Finally, run defrag.
Open your video card settings utility. Turn things down. Then go into the game and in the graphics settings turn more things down. You'll want to play with all these settings to get the best balance of graphics and playability.
If after all this you're still having issues the cheapest upgrade is to add RAM. What kind and how much will depend on your system but this is a good bang for the buck upgrade that will run about $20-30.
The next step in upgrades is a new video card. This will depend on the type of video slots you have and on your power supply which may also need to be upgraded to upgrade the video card. Decent cards will run $50+ and a new power supply will double that at least.
If you get to the point of upgrading any hardware visit the Harware and Software forms for advice and recommendations.
Hope this helps at least a few of you. Remember... a clean system is a happy system.
