windows xp 256 RAM

[Mirkwood]

cheers Kool i am glad that i will be able to at least play it now...
apart from your T&L problem how does the game play with your specs is it very slow do u have to play on smaller maps etc have u got to the mid-end game and does it slow to a snail...?

Look 4ward to your reply as u seem to have the same spec as me but for the video card..

[Kool-Aid Man]

willem.... the problem with updating my gear is that
a) i have a laptop
b) i am in brazil and buying computer equipment is insanely expensive. 512 mb of ram for my laptop costs $200 here, the same memory on newegg is $45. i only bought this computer because i didnt think i could get my tower through customs.... how wrong i was!! luckily in 3 months or so i will be back in the states and i will get my tower back, and it will play civ iv without problems.

mirkwood.... i have been playing on regular sized maps with quite a bit of lag, but no crashes. smaller maps work better. i do recommend increasing the size of your virtual memory, at least you wont run out in the middle of the game and crash.

currently my game is in the 19th century and i just finished destroying the english i would say that i am playing the game successfully!

[thedohman]

Works for me

256 RAM
AMD Athlon XP 1700
Gforce2 MX, 64MB
WinXP SP2

Movies are choppy.
Somethings do take a while (like 2 min to turn on gridlines)

But gameplay is pretty smooth, though I've only uncovered half the standard map so far. Once the grids are there, they don't seem to slow anything down.

I updated my drivers before getting the game (based on things I had seen here), but other than that, I never needed to adjust anything, works like a charm.

[mrs_c]

Mirkwood ... I assume you're already running XP in classic mode with a classic menu system. Saves tons of memory doing this. Disconnect from the internet and close down everything else. Also, there are ways to lighten the screen. You can set up the config to so the map is 'explored' when you start and there's a tab on the bottom right of the screen that really lightens everything up.

I have 1gb ram and have the same problems as everyone else with the game lagging terribly once improvements are made. Save the game every hour and do a hard reboot. That seems to clean out the memory leak problems.

good luck

[Willem]

Originally posted by thedohman
Works for me

256 RAM
AMD Athlon XP 1700
Gforce2 MX, 64MB
WinXP SP2

Movies are choppy.
Somethings do take a while (like 2 min to turn on gridlines)

But gameplay is pretty smooth, though I've only uncovered half the standard map so far. Once the grids are there, they don't seem to slow anything down.

I updated my drivers before getting the game (based on things I had seen here), but other than that, I never needed to adjust anything, works like a charm.

You're lucky, everything about your system is on the lower end. Do yourself a favour and get more RAM. With XP you should have at least 512, 1 gig would be even better. XP alone uses up more than 256 meg, so anything you run has to use Virtual Memory, which is very slow compared to RAM. You'll notice a huge improvement overall with 1 gig, and I don't mean just Civ 4.

[Mirkwood]

thx mrs_c what is classic mode sorry to be such a non buff here...how do i ensure i am in classic mode ..cheers

thx again to all who have posted when my game arrives i will post back whether after all this i can play this game.

I do think all in all a new pc is what i need and at least Father Christmas is coming and my birthday closely follows in the January...

[Mart]

Operating system using 256Mb? Do we have a technological progress here at all? I remember times when machines with 8 (eight) EIGHT Megabytes of RAM were smoking.

[alva]

Wait until Vista comes out...

Gigabytes from then on, we'll be laughing at "ONLY 256MB"!!

[Orcrist]

Originally posted by alva
Wait until Vista comes out...

Gigabytes from then on, we'll be laughing at "ONLY 256MB"!!

we will be laughing?

Sorry, but hasn't it been at least a year since even the cheapo computers had only 256 MB of memory? When I was shopping for laptops a year ago, they were *all* standard with 512 MB.

Originally posted by mart7x5
Operating system using 256Mb? Do we have a technological progress here at all? I remember times when machines with 8 (eight) EIGHT Megabytes of RAM were smoking.

You young whippersnappers I remember when 64 Kilo-bytes was smoking, but I'm sure someone can trump that with: 64 KB? You bastards, we had 8 KB and were grateful... etc. blah blah blah.

The technological (and economic in this case) progress is that I can get 256 MB DDR 400 RAM for €27.00 at the local store today (well, not today, it's a holiday here in Germany). That's about enough to buy dinner for two at a modestly-priced restaurant here in Munich. I remember when I upgraded my 8 MB to 24 MB: That cost me about twice that much. So, the progress happens on all sides, and since a lot of people want to benefit from those advances, software is written which takes advantage of beefier systems, otherwise what's the point?

[alva]

we will be laughing?

Sorry, but hasn't it been at least a year since even the cheapo computers had only 256 MB of memory? When I was shopping for laptops a year ago, they were *all* standard with 512 MB.

I was talking about how much an OS uses, not much memory we have.

You young whippersnappers I remember when 64 Kilo-bytes was smoking, but I'm sure someone can trump that with: 64 KB? You bastards, we had 8 KB and were grateful..

"You were lucky! We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank! We used to have to go up every morning, at six o'clock and clean the newspaper, go to work down the mill, fourteen hours a day, week in, week out, for six pence a week, and when we got home, our dad would slash us to sleep with his belt!"

[Mart]

I'm into mobile systems. memory costs more here. And I bought my system 2 years ago investing into faster processor and getting 256 Mb RAM. So I'm kinda out of the race here. Some of my friends use even slower systems, coz they use it for tasks not that demanding from hardware.

[Mirkwood]

well i suppose not being all that interested in the first person shooters and all the lights and special effects games being mainly into turn based stuff I have not needed anything more than 256.

Pirates ran well as does Rome total war so that really was the limit of my needs .Civ 4 has raised the bar in keeping with the upto date pc's but this is the only game that would push me out to upgarde at the moment.

All of my fav games play wonderfully well on my system so stick that in your gigabyte pipe and smoke it

...........but i will still need to upgrade... bah

[Brizey]

It costs money to go fast, cars or computers.

My system is five years old and hopeless (Pentium III 1 GHZ, 256 MB, 32 MB GF2). It kicked ass when it was new, and the only upgrade I did was adding a 128 stick to get 256. But, alas, it is time to move on. And with a baby on the way and a wife like mine...oh well, she somehow let me drop about $4000 into the WRX, so I guess I used up all my "toy points". I won't be building a new system until next year sometime, so no Civ4 for now. At least the patches will be out by the time I get it.

Funny thing is I bought Civ3 the day it came out and I was unemployed at the time!!

[Kool-Aid Man]

i am flying to the states on saturday for a business trip. thank god for newegg.com, my new memory will be waiting for me on arrival, and then we we shall see if i can play civ 4 well enough with 768 mb ram with my crappy pentium m 1.5 and my intel "video" card. whoohoo!!

[Willem]

Originally posted by mart7x5
Operating system using 256Mb? Do we have a technological progress here at all? I remember times when machines with 8 (eight) EIGHT Megabytes of RAM were smoking.

My first computer was a Viv 20 with a whopping 20k of memory. Calculators today have more than that.

And yes I'm old.