Long map load time? Possible solution here

Ok guys I play on a laptop, its not the fastest of computers but my load times were terrible.

By terrible I mean 2 minutes average per load screen, I could go downstairs, make a cup of coffee and be back in time for it to finish loading lol.

I figured it might be fragmented files or a bad hard drive, since laptop hard drives generally arent as fast as desktop ones but nevertheless I tried O&O defrag.

Speed increased slightly but not anything massive, i probably knocked about 10 seconds off load time. Windows defrag had same effect.

I read on a forum somewhere that Disktrix UltimateDefrag was the best defrag on the market. I have to say I was skeptical as to whether it would do anything different to O&O, however I have to say it was a great move.

You can set it so it places a file of your choice on the faster part of the hard drive (the outer part) meaning your load times will greatly increase. I set CohUpdater.exe and cityofheroes.exe to the priority files in the options menu for the drive, and set it on auto and started defrag.

It took a good few hours to do the entire drive (left it on overnight from 12 midnight and checked it 6am it was only on 72%) but it was very worth it. Now my map loading speed is about 10-15 seconds. For anyone having similar issues I strongly recommend you give this a try, particularly on laptops.

Theres also a feature letting you defrag your files when you reset the comp, so you can include system files but I havent tried this yet so I cant comment on it.

What that tells me is that you'd benefit even more from additional RAM. That's the biggest difference-maker in load times.

How can RAM be the issue if I said a defrag sorted it...

I can certainly attest to the effectiveness of adding more RAM to the machine... I had a machine with 1GB of RAM that had average load times in the 1 minute + range. Adding more RAM to move it to 2GB cut those average times to roughly 20 -30 seconds. Moving to 4GB only shaved another 5 seconds or so... the sweet spot seems to be 2GB... with less the machine lugs and has to cache to the hard drive while more only offers marginal improvement.

By the way, from the tone of your earlier comments it seems you don't really understand the difference between RAM and your hard drive. My apologies if you already know this, but your hard drive is where your computer stores information... it's a relatively slow storage medium. Think of the hard drive as an encyclopedia on a shelf in another room. RAM is where the information your computer is currently using is stored, it's a MUCH faster medium so you want enough of it so that your computer can fit most of the game into it... that way it doesn't have to go back to the slower hard drive when you change zones for more data. Think of RAM as a notebook in your hand with information you expect to need right away. The more RAM you have the more of the game your computer can access immediately and the less time it has to spend looking in the hard drive for.

This is of course a very simplified explanation but it gets the basics across. As an analogy you can jot down some notes on a subject and keep them in front of you but if you come across something your notes don't cover you have to go to the other room and get the encyclopedia off the shelf to look it up... this is kind of how RAM vs Hard Drive works.

The short of it is that adding RAM to your machine up to about 3GB is the biggest enhancement you can make to your zone times. After you've moved to more than 2GB any other improvements will be incremental instead of drastic.

More RAM helps because the OS doesn't have to juggle memory to and from the swap file on the hard drive and compared to RAM, a hard drive is 100+ times slower.

Defrag works because most patches will read in, patch if required and then write every pigg file in the game. Even if they aren't modified. If your hard drive is full or simply doesn't have a lot of contiguous blocks of free space, the pigg files will fragment (some are quite large). Several free third party defrag utilities allow you to defrag a specific directory (Defraggler, Auslogics Disk Defrag) and tend to take less time than defragging the whole drive.

I wasnt fully aware of how a defrag worked in all honesty in comparison to RAM but I will say I'm on 2gb RAM now, so its not really low.

I just found this a cheap and easy solution to loading issues so thought if anyone else has similar issues it might be worth trying before going out and buying more computer parts

On laptops in particular theres not much more you can change anyway with them usually so if one program can help as much as it has, I think its a great idea

I should also add, my laptop has 3 hard drives each at 30gb and that program can defrag all 3 at once which is also a great time saver.

After doing the system boot defrag, my load times now are generally less than 10 seconds which I am really happy about.