Help! My loading times are VERY long (1,5 minutes long) What could be wrong?!

[Kidanski]

Everytime I load a game, or when the game loads a new area, it takes a looong time. I chronometed and each load is 2 minutes long.
In game, the game runs flawlessly, Everything maxed except AA, which is 4X (granted, its in 800x600 resolution)

My Specs are:

P4 2.4 C
2x 256 Dual channeled DDR 400 RAM
Radeon 9600 PRO 128
7200 8mb cache HD

I defragd my hd today.
I have the latest patch.
I already am using -console (start up loading is only 15s )
heapsize 256, and a lot of other tweaks, no dice, though.

Is it normal, am i not supposed to get a much quicker loading time? It really disrupts the experience (

On a related note:
In the console, i get messages like this all the time;


Missing Close Caption Token cardboard.scraperough
Missing Close Caption Token popcan.scraperough
CSceneEntity LCS_becareful unable to find actor named "mark_boxcar_human_opendoor"

 

[blackeye]

A couple thing contribute to long load times.

CPU: Slower cpu's mean your load time is going to take longer. A 2.4 ghz p4 wont load nearly as fast as a 3.4

Memory:512 mb's will increase load time conciderably. My friend has 512mb's of memory and he takes 2 times longer then me to load sometimes. Howevor he doesnt have raptors either and he only has a 2.8ghz p4 cpu.

Hard Drive: The fact that your hard drive is 7200 rpm is holding you back. What is your seek time and burst rate? It would be absolutly useless to upgrade to a raptor just to increase load time IMO, 7200 is more then enough. Also format your hard drive after every install.

Howevor if cs:s is taking two minutes to load then you have something wrong because it should only take a couple seconds. If it is having trouble finding an object try reinstalling it and see if that helps.

Run a couple hard drive bencmarks to see if you can narrow down your problem, because the problem might not have to do with your hard drive and instead cs source.

 

[Killing2Live]

Plus your processor is a Celeron which is horrible and I think runs even slower than a Duron 1.8 GHZ in some cases

 

[ATI4EVER!]

i ahve an aweimse 1.8ghz P4!!!
load times are not bad. (think 30 sec.)

Oh HL2 has a HD all for itself though.

 

[bosox188]

Plus your processor is a Celeron which is horrible and I think runs even slower than a Duron 1.8 GHZ in some cases

No, it's a Pentium 4 2.4ghzC, the C meaning it's a Northwood, the best kind of P4's, and it's actually a pretty good cpu but yeah not as quick as a 3.0 or higher might be. Ram is definitely holding you back, upgrading to Dual Channel PC3200 (DDR400) 512mb will boost loading times.

 

[lord_galathon]

Mine is running off a SATA drive and it loads quite quickly, probably under 45 seconds. Not bad considering it's only an Athlon XP 2600+.

BTW Blackeye, you don't format after installing HL2, you defrag. Silly.

 

[Killing2Live]

My bad, thought that the C meant Celeron