civ2 on windows xp home performance ?

geofelt · May 22, 2002, 23:39

I just installed civ2(2.42) on a new windows xp(home) computer. Civ2 seems to function properly with one exception. Every few minutes, civ2 seems to pause for 10 seconds or so for no apparent reason. I used the system monitor to see a drop in cpu usage at about the same time. The new system has 256mb of memory, and the monitor did not show any increase in paging at the time. I am new to win-xp, is there anything I should look at?

Bloody Monk · May 23, 2002, 00:59

Quote:

Originally posted by geofelt
I just installed civ2(2.42) on a new windows xp(home) computer. Civ2 seems to function properly with one exception. Every few minutes, civ2 seems to pause for 10 seconds or so for no apparent reason. I used the system monitor to see a drop in cpu usage at about the same time. The new system has 256mb of memory, and the monitor did not show any increase in paging at the time. I am new to win-xp, is there anything I should look at?

I got a new box at Christmas running xp-home. The first thing I installed was Civ II, in C/Programs. There have been no problems; in fact, xp is smoother and much more stable than 98. Still, we are still talking about Windows. Have you tried an uninstall/reinstall of Civ??

Scouse Gits · May 23, 2002, 03:20

yup - Civ2 runs a treat on my daughter's XP laptop ...

SG[1]

Bloody Monk · May 23, 2002, 09:06

The Sun this am brings another idea.

XP has more than twice the files as 98 and then there is the stuff the vendor put together. The poor thing needs a defrag. It took an hour and a half the first time but only 15 min now. Needed big time!! Hope this helps stop your dropout.

geofelt · May 23, 2002, 11:08

I think it is interrupting civ2 and looking to see if anything else needs to run. civ2 runs the same in all other respects. Are there any win-xp tuning knobs I might look at? I use the cd; are there any cd buffers I can increase like there was on win-98?

Smash · May 23, 2002, 14:38

It must be something with the cdrom end.I get these big pauses as the the game changes music.Fortunately it will run without the cd or I can just turn music off.

A few slowdowns with the 16mb animated advisor in use as well.That also can be de-selected fortunately.

Other than that,I have 2.42,FW and MGE all working fine on XP.

geofelt · May 25, 2002, 00:40

I turned off the music and that did the trick. Can you increase the number of cd buffers on xp? I kind of like the music.

Mercatia · May 25, 2002, 02:13

Quote:

Originally posted by geofelt
I kind of like the music.

Sorry for the spam but....

Yikes!!!!

Verrucosus · May 28, 2002, 09:15

The music included on the CD is pretty good, but a nice feature of Civ2 is that you can use any music CD you like. When I encoutered geofelt's problem, I tried to minimize it by using longer pieces, so the music changes occur less often. (I apologize in advance to anyone who considers it an insult to Beethoven to play the movements of one of his piano concerts in random order.) This solution works only until about the middle of the game. Later, when Shaka starts calling you every three turns to ask whether you want to help him against the Persians, the interruptions come so often that you hardly ever have a chance to hear a piece in full length. Now that I think about it, I wonder whether disabling the "Diplomacy Screen" under the graphics option in the game menu would allow the background music to continue during diplomatic dialogue.

Regards,
Verrucosus