Long Loading times

[rstuck]

Despite I have FS 2002 installed on a separate HD I have very long loading times when I load sceneries or saved flights ( 1-2 minutes when I activate the Lago Terramesh sceneries !). Is there any solution to shorten this time?
(Everything else works fine, the sim runs smoothly, I have good frame rates with all sliders maxed up, and no blurries. )

Thanks in advance!

Roland Stuck
Strasbourg
France

My system specs:

Asus A7V333
XP 2000 +
512 Mb DDR333
GF3 Ti 200
1st HD : Seagate Barracuda 20 Gb
2nd HD: IDE 40 Gb IBM 7200 UDMA100
Windows 98 SE

[Bereaux]

That sounds very very odd... I have a very similar machine (same processor and MOBO) with the LAgo meshes etc lost of addon scenery, and generally get loaded up in about 20 -30 seconds.

What speed is your Barracuda drive is it a new or old one??? If it is your FS2002 drive and it is slow it may be your bottleneck. Also, if both your drives are connected on the same cable, they should both be fast, otherwise one will slow down the other and they'll both work at the same speed.

[rstuck]

Thanks for your tips
The Barracuda drive is an ATA II model ST320420 A but I have now idea how fast it is. It is configured as master and FS is alone on the IBM disk (slave). I will try to use only the IBM disk but I have the feeling that the HD work normally and that the problem is more related to the way the textures are managed by the system because the loading process becomes slow only during the loading of the textures. Maybe Simon has a clue ?

[Ivaneck]

Hello,

Your Seagate drive is an UDMA/66, whereas your IBM is a UDMA/100. The Seagate is noticeably more slow.

Since you have enough RAM to avoid memory swapping, IMHO is best to locate Windows, swap file, and the sim on your IBM drive, and reserve the Seagate to store other things.

Try hanging Seagate in your secondary IDE controller, leaving primary controller dedicated for the more fast IBM.

Also, verify the cables used for connect your disks. If you use a "normal" cable (40 wires), disks connected to it will run in PIO4 mode (muuuch more slow than UDMA). UDMA disk must be connected with 80 wires cables.

Specs page for your Seagate: http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/...st320420a.html

Hope this helps,

Joan Coll
Barcelona, Catalonia

[Leif]

One of the best benchmark programs I have used is Fresh.
you find download link and info here:

http://www.freshdevices.com/freshdiag.html

//Leif

[JSkorna]

Run defrag.exe on both drives on a regular basis. That might help somewhat.