The average filesize of the pr mod for bf2 is 120k I think so there is very little you can to speed things up afaik

A raid wont help because the filesizes are too small. A raptor would help as that has a low seek time also maybe a scsi hard drive with 15,000 RPM. I think those cost hundreds at their cheapest though.

A solid state drive should have excellent seek time since its basically memory. 10GB of memory is probably quite cheap now and should fit bf2 on there.

If you think of the hdd as a record player or old jukebox it might help
Things to consider when buying a hard drive are Seek time, RPM & density of data storage. The last one is to do with seperate platters, sometimes a bigger drive is slower and older in its technology but usually new and big is good. Sata 2 has high burst throughput, good for small files maybe as they will load from the hdd cache faster.

Vista has the ability to use a memory stick as a kind of fast small cache. ie. its quicker to fetch a 120k file from a memory stick then it is to tell the hard drive to shift its drive head over to that yonder file and read, big files still need the hdd though.


You can do this immediately but it might not help, try:

my computer > right click > properties > advanced > performance, settings > advanced


Set the pagefile [Virtual memory] to a constant [custom] high figure like 888, put it on a physically seperate drive from windows, temp dir or the game files. Also do not locate those drives on the same channel if you still use IDE

Change the other buttons and see if it helps..


I recommend clearing the startup group out too. If you have every program you've used in the last 5 years loaded in there it will slow things down. Some will want to examine every file you load into memory, not good.

Clear your drive so its at least 30% empty


Slow map loading is normal though, windows defrag is not great & winxp should not use more then 150meg normally