getting blood from a stone (or revitalizing an older computer)

Adding more RAM will definitely help with GC2; the larger maps are very memory intensive, so having that RAM there should mean less swapping and better performance in general.

There are a lot of requirements and things that you must know before doing the kind of upgrade that you probably need. I'd say a good start is a new processor and vid card. Depending on you motherboard and what socket it is that could be easy or hard, which may mean a new motherboard. The good news is that a mobo, processor, and vid card that is mid range could cost as little as 200 dollars ($40 for the mobo, 50-75 for the processor, around 100 for the vid card) But like I said there are a lot of things you have to know, like if the ram will work in the new motherboard, what size motherboard to get, and so on. (this kind of upgrade probably requires a reinstall of windows do to the major hardware change)

This kind of stuff isn't hard for someone who knows what to do, so if you have a friend that knows computers and has built their own ask them what the best thing to do is. I recently bought that combo for myself (mobo, pro, and vid card) and installed it and am currently looking at parts for a friend that wants that kind of upgrade.

About your question about ram, more ram is always better, it will help the vid card with the large textures and keep the program from storing stuff on the hard drive (game related for recall, thus reducing hd thrashing).

The bottleneck you experience, or will be experiencing is probably from a combination of vid card and processor, that 9550 just won't cut it for much longer and even though it is a AMD, 1.1GHz could be a bit slow for what you want to do (no to mention probably a painful FSB)

My opinion is that you should upgrade the pro, mobo and vid card (which may mean ram too), but if you can really only do one or two things and don't want to upgrade a processor or mobo then more ram is always good and a new video card couldn't hurt(like a 9800 or up into the x1k series)

Personally, I would hold off doing any upgrading to your current setup.

Any money you spend on it will be a pure waste once you get a new computer.

At the very least you would spend over a hundred dollars to see any real improvement, and that money is better saved and spent on the new rig. You can get something much faster for $500-600 from HP or Gateway.

I would put up with a sometimes slow game - since you indicate that it does run adequately - and save up all the sooner for that new computer.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions,very helpful! I have a few options to consider now. 

I upgraded my computer after a 170 hour Civ 3 game, I bet half of that time was loading and waiting for computers to move. And yes it was a HUGE map and I did win

best bang for our money would be to bump your ram up to 1 gig its the most effective for the least cost.

More ram and maybe see if you can get an AGP 6600GT from ebay. The price on XP2500+s has really tanked recently too...

Well, just a quick update.
I recently purchased 1 gig of ram for my comp. now giving me a total of 1280 (I kept a stick of 256 mb from before).

From what I can observe there is certainly a performance boost. Going from 512 mb to 1280 seems to have helped and it was a relatively cheap upgrade as well.

I have restricted my current playing style to medium and small maps only, but will now try moving up to the larger maps. The additional ram should help with this, or at least allow me to play all abundant everything on medium size maps with better performance, but playing larger galaxies is my goal.

If things work out I may look for a vid. card upgrade later as well, but for now let's just see.

Thanks again for everyone's suggestions.

I agree in general with Moosetek's advice to save for a whole new rig, but keeping your XP box healthy until the first few updates after Vista SP1 will probably have real value.

I'm a very old hand at the PC thing and am having the least pleasant "experience" yet with a new machine. The fantastically cheap, powerful hardware mentioned above is a boost in many regards, but not as much as you might think given the ludicrous loads of crapware that will come with any OEM machine and the convoluted, incomplete nature of Vista itself.

p.s. I should confess that after apparently working through the Vista + Nvidia + GalCiv2 = Misery problem, the game itself has been behaving sweetly and my loading and turn processing is *much, much* faster. Now, instead of losing lots of time to overhead in a GC2 game, I can lose it on really useful things like trying to figure out why the frak the defrag routine or the freakin' Aurora *screen saver* would want Internet access...

I have an older machine myself and a recent RAM upgrade from 512 to 1G was a great investment. Load times and between turn times have drecreased quite a bit. Also the response time switching focus from the game to other applications is a lot quicker. And that's just with crappy PC-2700 ram(All my old Asus MB can handle   )

yeah RAM's cheap, and it isn't always easy to buy and entirely new computer.

i bought my computer about a year and a half ago right before the Core 2 Duos came out (it's a Pentium D). i'd have to upgrade the mobo to upgrade the processor. it's got a Radeon X600 (low profile), and i'd like to upgrade to a X1600 but i think i'd probably need a new PSU. it's a low profile machine and it was only ever meant to be a media center in the long run. so i don't want to put too much more money into it - but i see no reason not to keep it healthy. in another year or so when the costs go down a bit more i'm going to buy a 1080p LCD TV, and when i'm ready to retire this machine from gaming, it'll be mainly used for DVDs, TV/DVR and music (and since it's got firewire it'll be easy to store stuff on external drives).

i'll keep my 24" monitor for a new gaming rig. i'm sure it can't last forever, but since the long-term things i have in mind for it are relatively modest, i could see it lasting quite longer than a gaming rig. but i still probably won't buy anything 'cutting edge'.

Problem with upgrading is they change stuff so much, an older computer has very limited options. You can find compatible peformance parts on eBay pretty cheap, but eventually, you have to change your platform. I upgrade my system about once a year and it seems I always have to replace most of the parts. Sometimes I think they change stuff just for the sake of changing stuff. I spent a bunch of money on my current build, but didn't get a justifiable performance improvement from last year's build. Of all the upgrades I've done, the current one was the most money spent with the least result. I wish they would stop killing upgrade paths for meager performance gains.

Depending on the type of parts you buy, Overclocking is still an option. "Newer" old parts are more agreeable to over clock than bleeding age parts. An AMD XP Barton core, like the 2400+ Could be bumped up considerably and will fit in your A socket.

Unfortunately, given your platform, none of your parts will carry over to a new machine (due to different memory, Expansion slots, and processor slots). So its not practical to buy a high quality part as you won't be able to use it when you build your new rig. When my computer got hit by lightning last year (don't ask), resulting in me having to buy a new motherboard, I pretty much had to replace every part but my Optical and sound devices.

I agree with MooseTek13 (Reply #3).
I myself waited, bought a new rig, and all is fine. Any money I would have spent just on upgrading the older box simply went to the new purchase. And I have uses for the old one still..
But now my new one is old already..lol..

I guess I can't complain too much, I mean after all I have managed to keep my rig going for 5 years or so with very little in the way of equipment upgrades. Just a vid. card last year, a cd burner shortly thereafter, and now some extra ram, so all in all not bad I'd say.
Probably no more than $200.(CDN) spent over the span of 5 years.
That's the great thing about TBS games is that you can get away with a lot less as far as hardware goes, unlike other games.
Turn based strategy games will give your machine a longer shelf-life.


Sorry to hear about your woes with Vista GW, but from what I hear you're not alone.
By the time I'm ready to move up (hardware and OS), the wrinkles should be ironed out.

Right on Deth...
This has been my experience so far as well. I purchased some PC3200 DDR, but it's ok, because it's backward compatible with the PC2100 ram originally installed. My MB is ASUS as well, A7A 266 IIRC.

This is what I'm hoping for Kryo. After I finish my current med. galaxy game, it'll be on to a large galaxy map... should be interesting.

bingo!

I have owned IBM compatable machines since their early days after i ended my flirtation with 'Amiga' computers. I distincly remember that in the early days you could get up to 4 useful upgrades with a computer over 4 years. Ever since those early days i have been noticing more and more upgrade paths getting stomped on because of non compatability. Nowdays you cannot even get 1 upgrade out of a year old computer, you have to go and buy a whole new pile of parts each time.... oh except perhaps your CD drive! yes they are still kind enough to let you keep that at least!!

One good thing tho - since computer component sales have gotten so greedy over recent years, it is often cheaper just to buy a new system than upgrade anyway!

My sympathies CraigHB

I decided a long time ago not to get into the trap of buying the newest and fastest of anything, it just seems to get old faster (performance anxiety/keeping up with the Joneses).
After buying a new comp. every 2 years, I through my hands up in disgust, and just relaxed and enjoyed what I had at the time.
I know my next rig certainly won't be "leading edge", most likely a few tiers back from that.

That is a wise strategy, i always go for a 'midrange' system which typically gives you the most bang for your bucks. Once you go to far up from midrange, the performance gain per dollar drops off dramatically.

Mr Wave,
You should be advised that, although backward compatible, the presence of the 256Mb stick of PC2100 is probably limiting the performance of ALL of your memory to PC2100 speed. Possibly a better tech-head here on the forum can confirm. You should try the system with just the new stick in place and see what the perceptible perf difference is.

drrider

Not sure if Mr Wave's(I like that   ) MB is like mine, but I actually have Pc3200 installed and the MB clocks it down to PC2700. Asus' design allows 512MB of 3200, 1024MB of 2700, and 2048MB of 2100. So if it's got the max in it , it may be clocking it down anyway. Think I have an A7V8x-X or some such MB.

well this forum came along with seredipitous timing. my PSU really started dying this weekend. i'd always problems with it, but never like this. this weekend my computer started crashing repeadedly, and the diagnostic light indicates the PSU load is exceeding its supply (i've had this problem in rare instances since i got the computer, and tech support had me doing hours upon hours worth of diagnostics; i just found a diagnostics manual online that in very clear language told me exactly what the problem is - gotta love Dell).

hope it's not rude to ask about my own problem in your forum, particlewave; i'm hoping i can get some advice.

i'm surprised the PSU ever worked; i checked the specs and it's only a 255 watt. it's a Dell XPS 200, which i haven't upgraded since purchasing, came with a 1.4 (i think) Pentium D, 1GB of RAM, a Radeon X600. i want to make sure my new PSU will power a better GPU; i'm pretty sure a 400W supply should definately take care of me.

i might just go ahead and get the new GPU now, i'm just not exactly sure what to get. because my long-term goal is for this system to be primarily a media center, gaming power isn't necessarily my first concern (but i won't be able to afford a new system for some time, so it's still up there). it's also a low profile system, so i'm somewhat constrained in my choice of GPU upgrades.

here's my basic quandry. in another couple years i'm going to buy a nice new LCD TV. i'll purchase a model that can support 1080p since it's the next broadcast standard on the horizon, and it'll still produce quite nice computer graphics when i'm not using it as a TV (i run at WUXGA now).

if i've done my homework right, i'll probably need to get a DVI-HDMI converter, but i'm not sure if there's something i should know about it. the wikipedia article on DVI says DVI "is partially compatible with the High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) standard in digital mode (DVI-D)." i'm not exactly sure what that means - what part is not compatible? is it that the HDMI has wires for audio? because AFAIK the specs should allow even a DVI-I to convert to HDMI without loss. i dunno, any thoughts?

anyway, these seem to be the two best low profile cards from nVidia and ATI respectively; the ATI supports DVI-D but the nVidia seems to have more onboard RAM and a higher core clock speed.


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133016

and this is the only low profile X1600 i could find

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161040

i'd appriciate any advice or input, especially keeping in mind my eventual plan to change to an HDTV as my monitor (while keeping the surround sound speakers i currently have - though it'd be really nice to be able to use the TV's speakers to upgrade to 7.1 - any ideas on that?).

Dystopic, your post looks like it deserves a new thread? (if you don't already have one out there) so more computer geniouses would notice it.

If i was in your position, i would not be too worried about accommodating needs that are at least a year away - by then i would imagine there would be much better technology developed anyway.

hmm, you're right. okay, *poof* here it is.

i composed that reply in occasional spasms between work, and i didn't realize it'd gotten so long.