Jumping

[TomAL]

Hi, I have a fairly fast computer (athlon xp 1800+, 256mb ram, geforce 3 etc). I have a problem with Jedi Knight 2, when loading a game it takes around 3 mins! And when the game accesses the hard drive the game jumps allot so much that you cant play the game in action, but walking through a scene that is in memory it is a smooth as silk. Could you tell me firstly is it normal to take 3 mins to load up a saved mission? and Secondly does anyone else suffer from this jumping problem? and have any fixes.

 

Thanks

[SearcherUK]

Hi Tomal,

 

Quite a strange problem you seem to be suffering with here.

 

Although I'm no expert when it comes to games, I can tell you that a load time of 3 minutes is excessive. I have a very similar system spec to yours and my load time can be measured in seconds, not minutes.

 

Assuming the problem is associated with your hard drive, there are a few things which you can easily check to ascertain whether this is the cause of your problem.

 

1. Make sure there's enough free space available on C: to make a healthy swap file. Normally 10% of the overall size should be sufficient. If this isn't available then I suggest uninstalling some apps/games to free up some room.

 

2. Is the hard drive optimized? i.e. Does it need defragging? The generic hard drive optimization utility that comes with Windows is C**P so I suggest getting hold of a more efficient version. Norton Utilities is a good example. However, if you're running Windows XP this shouldn't be necessary.

 

3. The hard drive maybe faulty. IBM has an excellent hard drive test utility, called "drive fitness test (DFT)". It's free and all you need is a spare floppy disk to install it on. Don't worry, it will test other manufacturer's hard drives. Just follow the link below to get a copy.

 

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm

 

Hope this helps