Optimization Guide

[Bubblehead]

I read and article "FS2004 and WinXP Optimization Guide" suggesting that separating FS programs (FS2004, etc.) from the OS may improve performance somewhat. That is, place each in a different partition or different drives. I did it with the FS2002 (OS in C:drive and FS2002 in H:drive) and my initial observation was that when you click on the FS2002 icon, it took a little longer for the game to come up but when I was on the game, it seemed to perform better overall (scenery, control, graphics) or it could just be my imagination. Any comments on this?

Bubblehead

[the_autopilot]

I read and article "FS2004 and WinXP Optimization Guide" suggesting that separating FS programs (FS2004, etc.) from the OS may improve performance somewhat. That is, place each in a different partition or different drives. I did it with the FS2002 (OS in C:drive and FS2002 in H:drive) and my initial observation was that when you click on the FS2002 icon, it took a little longer for the game to come up but when I was on the game, it seemed to perform better overall (scenery, control, graphics) or it could just be my imagination. Any comments on this?

Bubblehead

I would like you to post the results of a timedemo to vertify this claim.

[Gixer]

I do keep my OS on a seperate drive (The fastest one I have)

The main thing though is not to overfill any of your HDD's and partitions.  Ideally dont get any of them more than 50% full.  After this things will start to get slower, i.e. load times etc.

[Skligmund]

Logic would say that having FS in its own partition on the same IDE channel, let alone the same hard drive as the OS, would not gain you anything, and might actually reduce performance. I use this logic because it requires the read head to move to another part of the drive to access FS data, and back to the OS part of the drive to access OS data. By two hard drives on the same IDE ribbon cable, that reduces hard drive throughput a bit, and, while decreasing the time required to access different inforamtion (FS to OS and back), you may find occasional slow hard drive load times, though would be quicker than two partitions on a single hard drive.

My solution, using the logic I have stated (I have read no FS optimization guides or anything similar), is to have FS on its own hard drive on a different IDE channel than the OS. If required, an additional IDE/SATA card should be installed to allow for this.

Now this is the first time I thought about this (or did I in an earlier post??), but maybe I should put my 2 40Gb WD hard drives to use in RAID0 for FS/games only on its own array?