Making FM Run Faster

I'm running FM 8.02 on my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop (pentium 1.73ghz, 1gb RAM) but I'm getting appalling run speeds after just a year and a half into my Brighton game... The laptop is 3 years old, and I have recently defragged, ran virus checkers and ran RegCure to clean the registry. This has helped slightly but the game still takes about 2 minutes to load up, and during play the match engine can jerk and clicking on items results in pauses.

Is there anything else I can do to speed up play? I'm worried about FM09 and whether or not my system will be able to handle it in its current state. When the laptop was new, it was able to run FM06 and 07 very smoothly, and it is only recently that I have noticed this slowdown. The harddisk is not nearly full - in fact I am only using 11gb of 93gb, so I cannot work out why the system is running so poorly. Is my laptop just old and tired, or is there anything else I can do to spruce up the performance?

Thanks for your help, I'm desperate to play '09 but unable to afford a new computer.

P.S.: I'm desperate to get back to my Brighton game - just won my first game in 12!!

edit: Just to add, my Brighton game has all the leagues in England (prem to conf n/s) on a medium database.

Seems a little slow dude... you are running XP I assume?

Same specs on a Latitude D510, running the same leagues. Before anyone suggests more RAM will not make a difference. Best you can do is set your detail level to 'none' for any competitions you're not in. Even with that it takes about 2 to 3 minutes to process a set of results on a typical English Saturday.

Open up Task Manager while running FM. Keep an eye on the process associated with your antivirus. If you see it competing with FM for the CPU then disable it or add the various FM folders to your exclusion list. Even if it isn't I would do this as a precautionary measure as antivirus can be behind corruption of saves (http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php?t=43184)

Loading speed for the game is affected by a few things:-

(i) your hard drive speed

(ii) how heavily fragmented the save game is

(iii) whether you save them compressed/uncompressed

(iv) obviously the size of the save

Or you know, it could be to do with the fact the processor is really, really, old.

How far into your game are you? If your several game years into your game then this could be the reason for the slow load time and there really isn't too much you can do about that. Disable any icons that are on the bottom right of your desktop then open task manager and go to processes and stop as many of these as you can and this should help a bit but I think it might be time for a new laptop. If you've had it since FM2006 then thats really quite a long time in computer terms.

The best solution is to get more RAM... thats the best way to increase speed of old machine... or completely wiping it and starting afresh... but i would go with more ram first... if u have DRR then it'll be like £30 possibly but DDR2 would be like £15 obviously you would need somebody who knows what they are doing. Tho they may charge £30 quid for something ridiculously easy that takes 5 mins to do. (Its how PC World make their money) B*******.

I updated the RAM on my old laptop myself, just search the internet and you can easily find out how to do it yourself, no need to go to PC world to do it!

Same specs on a Latitude D510, running the same leagues. Before anyone suggests more RAM will not make a difference. Best you can do is set your detail level to 'none' for any competitions you're not in. Even with that it takes about 2 to 3 minutes to process a set of results on a typical English Saturday.

Open up Task Manager while running FM. Keep an eye on the process associated with your antivirus. If you see it competing with FM for the CPU then disable it or add the various FM folders to your exclusion list. Even if it isn't I would do this as a precautionary measure as antivirus can be behind corruption of saves (http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php?t=43184)

Loading speed for the game is affected by a few things:-

(i) your hard drive speed

(ii) how heavily fragmented the save game is

(iii) whether you save them compressed/uncompressed

(iv) obviously the size of the save

Will uncompressed speed it up???

Before anyone suggests more RAM will not make a difference

i would have said saving uncompressed may well speed it up, but i could be wrong... also, if you can do it, see if you can find out how heavily fragmented the save game is, obviously, if its heavily fragmented, itll take a lot longer to load...

I updated the RAM on my old laptop myself, just search the internet and you can easily find out how to do it yourself, no need to go to PC world to do it!

Yer i just didnt wanna be the one responsible if he broke his laptop fixing it lol!!!

Before anyone suggests more RAM will not make a difference

Erm thats where your wrong! What experience do you have? I'm an IT technician, fully qualified and everything and the best thing to improve performance after the things the guy has done already is install more RAM!!!!!!!! The only better thing is to get a better processor but thats wayyyyyy too much hassle especially for a laptop!

GET MORE RAM

because, id be willing to bet, its using 100% processor, and nowhere near that on ram. not too dissimilar to my pc's specs, and thats EXACTLY what mine does. so dont tell me i need more ram.

because, id be willing to bet, its using 100% processor, and nowhere near that on ram. not too dissimilar to my pc's specs, and thats EXACTLY what mine does. so dont tell me i need more ram.

Lol. When your comp doesnt have enough RAM it uses a page file which is done by accessing the hard-drive a lot..... and to access that info it uses processor to process the info. more RAM means it takes pressure off ur processor as it allows to load more applications on the RAM and not onto the virtual RAM on the Hard drive. More RAM more space takes pressure off other things so overall makes faster

Yer i just didnt wanna be the one responsible if he broke his laptop fixing it lol!!!

Erm thats where your wrong! What experience do you have? I'm an IT technician, fully qualified and everything and the best thing to improve performance after the things the guy has done already is install more RAM!!!!!!!! The only better thing is to get a better processor but thats wayyyyyy too much hassle especially for a laptop!

GET MORE RAM

Well, I hate to be the other IT guy who disagrees, but no. Ignoring my various related qualifications the more RAM thing is a little flaky since that little old 1.7Ghz CPU will be labouring like hell.

Might be time to look at a new laptop.

More RAM will only help up to a point. I could park my 4GB in there and it would not make much difference owing to the bottleneck being created by an overheating old pentium.

Lol. When your comp doesnt have enough RAM it uses a page file which is done by accessing the hard-drive a lot..... and to access that info it uses processor to process the info. more RAM means it takes pressure off ur processor as it allows to load more applications on the RAM and not onto the virtual RAM on the Hard drive. More RAM more space takes pressure off other things so overall makes faster

Equally, without asessing his RAM usage it could easily be a processor problem. XP will use the HDD pagefile irrespective of RAM amount something that's annoyed well RAM'd modders and tweakers for years.

Even Vista which is designed to make better use of RAM, even in the presence of a 2GB Readyboost Drive will still page to the HDD pagefile.sys

What we need is an idea of how much RAM is in use, and equally how much pagefile is in use along with an idea as to how much time the CPU spends at 99% usage.

I effin' hate this ramshackle PC worldesque approach that every PC needs more RAM (usually with the next to useless installation of Norton 360 or any of it's other Necromonger companions)

Well, I hate to be the other IT guy who disagrees, but no. Ignoring my various related qualifications the more RAM thing is a little flaky since that little old 1.7Ghz CPU will be labouring like hell.

Might be time to look at a new laptop.

More RAM will only help up to a point. I could park my 4GB in there and it would not make much difference owing to the bottleneck being created by an overheating old pentium.

This is true.. But he can't afford a new laptop... so for now he should add more RAM. i did say that yes the only thing better would be processor but in many cases better to buy whole new system than replace the processor.

EDIT: god pentiums suck , anyway so if you can't afford spanking new laptop for 500+ or wateva then cheapest option is RAM, try killing some processes.. maybe when u wanna play FM disconnect from the internet if ur arent already and kill your Anti-virus software.

I effin' hate this ramshackle PC worldesque approach that every PC needs more RAM (usually with the next to useless installation of Norton 360 or any of it's other Necromonger companions)

Sorry but i only said PC world are ridiculous cos they charge £30 for literally something a banana could do. I am in no way connected to the shambles that is PC world. I was merely offering a cost effective solution... although i am rubbish at explaining things sometimes.

PS: you didnt have to insult me.

Erm thats where your wrong! What experience do you have? I'm an IT technician, fully qualified and everything and the best thing to improve performance after the things the guy has done already is install more RAM!!!!!!!! The only better thing is to get a better processor but thats wayyyyyy too much hassle especially for a laptop!

GET MORE RAM

I run the same amount of leagues as him. I was in a given year with a given game. I hit continue and watched how much Physical Memory and VM FM used on 512 MB. I then installed my new 1 GB module. Loaded the same game, hit continue and guess what. More or less same distribution of Physical Memory and VM after 3 months in game time independent of the physical RAM available.

It made no use of the extra physical memory available by putting less into VM and more into PM. Why is that? Only the Windows people who wrote the controlling algorithms know. My guess would be that FM has info stored that you may never access (for example clicking on the profile of a generated player who you never even knew existed) and whatever way FM interacts with Windows it reads what you do and adjusts relative to that as the save game grows in required memory usage.

So unless his memory usage is such that he is actually getting regular heavy thrashing (not just reads and writes which will occur when FM reads and writes to it's cache files on the hard drive) then more RAM for his set up and his leagues will not make any difference. 'Get More' is a generalisation and with FM it is very much machine and save game variables specific.

As to your question I have zero IT qualifications/professional experience. You don't need qualifications to read a book and learn. If you want to get a job that's a different story .