Half Life 2 installation on a 'fresh' WinXP Pro or not?

[Cannibal Corpse]

I have two 120GB Maxtor HDD's (C:\Windows XP Pro and D:\Games) and I would like to know if all the stuff that I have installed on the C:\ drive (plus some games on D:\Games) would affect the performance of Half Life 2 playablity.

I mean I would love to install this game on a 'fresh' and 'clean' WinXP Pro OS. (with latest patches applied)

I also have always move the pagefile.sys to D:\ drive (1.5 x amount of physical RAM installed in the system, in my case 2048GB) for better performance and defrag my HDD's on a daily basis.

Pretty paranoid, huh! :bounce:

 

[MrMethane]

I'm thinking of doing a parallel install of XP with nothing but HL2 installed (except for SP1 and drivers)

Also, if I had one Gig of RAM, I would consider trying to run it without a swapfile.

 

[Typhon]

Originally posted by Cannibal Corpse
defrag my HDD's on a daily basis.

Pretty paranoid, huh! :bounce:

No, not paranoid at all. It's perfectly normal to not like the .00000000005 second delay that one day's worth of fragging will cause. If I were you, and really wanted to run HL2 in "decent" framerates, I would just buy a brand-new computer for a dedication HL2 machine.

:dozey:

edit: this thread reminds me of the one where you asked if your 2.4p4 1gig ram radeon 9800pro system could run HL2....

 

[Woggy]

Why is it 'paranoid', you afraid of something?

 

[Cannibal Corpse]

If my postes insults your 'intelligence' why do you even bother replying? You guys are so immature...I am out of these forums. I bet you are the same ones who cried when the game was delayed...GROW UP.

 

[burnzie]

Originally posted by Woggy
Why is it 'paranoid', you afraid of something?

if he dosent defrag everyday, lepricorns jump out of his monitor and attack him

a wise desision if you ask me.

j/k. its a good idea to defrag daily. (just in case :cheese

 

[6iXx]

You can do that if you want, you will only gain a 0.5% performace increase or something like that. If you have 1GB RAM you should be able to load the entire level to RAM so the only thing that will be affected is the loading times.

Anyway, we don't have the game yet, so no one will know. Try e-mailing a valve employee.

 

[nsxownzme]

Originally posted by MrMethane
I'm thinking of doing a parallel install of XP with nothing but HL2 installed (except for SP1 and drivers)

Also, if I had one Gig of RAM, I would consider trying to run it without a swapfile.

Well, I have 1.5GB/333Mhz ram, how do I turn off swapfile? kthnx

 

[MrMethane]

control panel/system/advanced/performance-->settings/advanced/virtual memory-->change/no paging file

Phew!

edit: Remember, we still don't know how much RAM it will take to be able to run HL2 with no pagefile. The only way to find out is to try!

 

[Magicpants]

Ok. First, split your pagefile between both drives - the 1.5x ram rule doesn't really always apply. 1gb is more than enough swap if you have 512mb or more. Do NOT disable it, this will screw Windows XP over. (although if you are running a 9x OS, it is ok to disable the swap).
Set the swap to be 512mb on each drive (512mb min, 512mb max)(aggregate 1gb) this way Windows is more likely to use both drives at once when swapping, thus combining the speeds of the two drives. If you want every little extra bit of performance, format the drives and re-install windows then immediately create the contigious swapfiles before you install game and apps etc, this will result in the swapfiles being near the centre of the HDD platter (thus increasing performance as the HDD heads will have less distance to travel) and ensuring that the swapfiles are as un-fragmented as possible (freshly formatted drive = no/few fragments).

Install this http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pagedefrag.shtml and set it to defragment your swapfiles every boot (works on all NT based OS i think, so NT,2000,XP)

Install Cacheman from here http://www.outertech.com
Cacheman is one of the best tools for tweaking cache sizes etc, the profiles it supplies aren't too bad or you can tweak yourself. Don't run cacheman on startup - the memory allocation thingy is not needed at least in WinXP (where it re-pools your memory every now and again, i can't remember the name of this - i'm at work.)

Install the latest video drivers for your card http://www.omegacorner.com/ I recommend these hacked drivers for both Nvidia and ATi cards over the generic ones.

Install the latest sound drivers - (i use an audigy1 but use the latest hacked Audigy 2 ZS drivers, try www.driverheaven.net - they work great for me but are only a few days old so i don't know how completely bug free they are for all users)

That's most of the things that'll make a big impact on the performance of your system.

If you need any more tweaking advice, just ask in this thread - i'm kinda working but i'll help where i can.

 

[MrMethane]

Hmm, well as I said, the only way to find out is to try. Whether it works or not will depend on the applications you run. I know of several people with who run with no pagefile and claim it's great. I can't see why they would lie.

For me (512MB) it didn't work well, though.

edit: A thread from another forum that might be of interest http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread/t-4141.html

 

[Magicpants]

I realise that you 'shouldn't' need a pagefile if you have enough memory, but some apps do require that you have one or they won't work. (i.e photoshop has some troubles if you have no pagefile) If you perform all the necessary tweaks (all included in Cacheman) such as keep windows in RAM blah blah then it should only ever use your pagefile as a last resort anyways...meaning that your system is no slower for enabling it, and just in case something wants the extra RAM (swap) it is available.

Anyways, i'm not 'telling' you what to do by all means disable the pagefile completely, maybe you won't get errors maybe you will. Who knows.
:cheese:

 

[Syphoon!!]

Yeah, reinstall Windows. Its analogous to changing your underwear after a week. You don't notice its slowly getting slower, but when you reinstall, you feel a lot fresher.

 

[-JeZ-]

Magicpants = hardware guru :thumbs:

Might try some of those tips myself

 

[Bramski]

You might want to look into making a seperate Gaming profile in winxp -

http://www.tweakxp.com/display.aspx?id=114

 

[Clush]

If my postes insults your 'intelligence' why do you even bother replying? You guys are so immature...I am out of these forums. I bet you are the same ones who cried when the game was delayed...GROW UP.

/watches Cannibal Corpse run away crying "i don't wanna play with you anymore!" like a tart

 

[Jabrim]

Reply:

Seems like it would run fine on Xp to me, I'm running Win2kPro which I prefer over any other MS operating system myself anyway.


- Jason

 

[Nathaniel]

I probably won't reinstall windows, since I've mastered the art of keeping my install nice and clean by cleaning a lot and defragging atleast once a week (believe me, it needs to be done).

but I might format when I switch out my old GeForce DDR for a brand spankin' new Radeon 9600Pro, since I don't want those pesky old detonators to contaminate my baby

 

[Caminante]

Originally posted by Cannibal Corpse
I have two 120GB Maxtor HDD's (C:\Windows XP Pro and D:\Games) and I would like to know if all the stuff that I have installed on the C:\ drive (plus some games on D:\Games) would affect the performance of Half Life 2 playablity.

I mean I would love to install this game on a 'fresh' and 'clean' WinXP Pro OS. (with latest patches applied)

I also have always move the pagefile.sys to D:\ drive (1.5 x amount of physical RAM installed in the system, in my case 2048GB) for better performance and defrag my HDD's on a daily basis.

Pretty paranoid, huh! :bounce:

Don't be silly. btw, Windows XP should tell you when it's time to defrag.

 

[Incitatus]

Defragging daily lol talk about senseless ways to waste time.

Not only that but every time you defrag it has to read the entire disk several times reducing the disks lifespan. (probably quite considerably)