PC tech help needed.

[BourneID]

Hey all... how you all doing... Been awhile.

Alright, so as some might know I haven't been in the sc4 community for awhile... mostly because I have been playing more Xbox360 online and FSX. Last week.... I got the SC4 itch to try out some of the airport lots and such that have come out.... So I started up Sc4 to play and .... it.........was....really.......slow. Then I notice that everything seemed to be really slow.

After a little looking around I notice that though there are 4 gigs of memory in my PC.... it is only displaying 2.5gigs in the system tab.

trouble shooting steps already taken:

1.  reset each 1gig stick into each slot and all read 1gig in each slot
2. checked in the boot.ini that /PAE is listed so that physical address extention there  (I have a AMD64 so it is supported)
3. looked in the Boot screen setup tab and all 4 sticks are listed there.

Anyone have a clue how I can get windows XP Pro to recognize the memory (it used to list 3.5 before) and speed up my system so that I can play some sc4

[BourneID]

I dont usually bump a thread... but I posted this pretty late at night so I am trying to get some more folk to see this and maybe someone will have some ideas.

[callagrafx]

If I recall, Windows XP 32bit can only support a maximum of 4GB, including the pagefile.  If you disable this, more RAM should show up.  Also make sure you have enabled the /3GB switch in the boot.ini file.  If you don't know how to do this, follow these steps:

1. Open the "System" control panel and hit the advanced tab
2. Click on the settings button in the startup and recovery sub-panel
3. Under system startup on the popup, click edit.  IT will launch notepad and open boot.ini
4. At the end of the operating system string, add in /3GB so it should read something similar to this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /3GB

5. OK both windows and restart. 

This article here http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308417 may be helpful too.

[BourneID]

thanks cal, I'll give that a try.

[Pat]

Would it also be possible to use that to trick the computer to think that there is more memory or would that mess it up?

[SC4BOY]

no but no

[Shadow Assassin]

Would it also be possible to use that to trick the computer to think that there is more memory or would that mess it up?

No, it's not possible, because there is a physical limitation to the amount of memory a 32-bit system can show - which is 4GB (2^32 bytes).

And Windows has that annoying habit of only showing 3GB or so... because the remaining 1GB or so has to be assigned to memory address space.

[callagrafx]

And Windows has that annoying habit of only showing 3GB or so... because the remaining 1GB or so has to be assigned to memory address space.

This happens because Windows sees all RAM (including pagefile and Video RAM) as system RAM and only allows a max of 4GB, so if you have 4GB installed in Physical RAM, Windows deducts the other RAM from the overall total of physical RAM.

[BourneID]

well...  one step forward... 5 steps backward. I gave that a try and it really hosed up my system... would not boot into windows.

So I went into the recovery counsul and did
delete c:\boot.ini

the did...
bootcfg /rebuild
/fast detect

to redo the boot.ini file and got the (windows could not find hal.dll, reinstall)
I tried
expand d:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\windows\system32\hal.dll
but it says that it could not read from the disk, even though I used it to load the recover counsol up. HELP please   

[callagrafx]

Adding a 3GB switch should not prevent Windows from booting...it sounds like you have more serious problems.  Did you upgrade to SP3 recently by any chance?

[Pat]

SA and Lee thank you both    I am so not tech savy at all lol

[BourneID]

I did... but removed it....   

[BourneID]

Alright...  here is the path of events:

after the update came out I did not install... watched the boards at PCworld to find out if any issues, problems, reveals of Bills diabolical plans to rule to universe.....

the major issue that affected me...   having a HP AMD64 pc. HP is cheap... so what they did was create a master OEM disk for installing windows... this would be fine but that disk was created on an Intel system... so there was a file intended for Intel based system. I installed the patch that came from Micro$oft and then installed SP3.

Even with that patch my system became a bit unstable. In trying to deal with that, I noticed that the readout of system RAM was not correct as is should be. I removed the service pack and patch though the add/remove as tech support had instructed...  and the system became more (or less) stable again... but the system RAM still wasn't right as before.

the rest of the steps are as described as before... I still cant get the HAL.dll to install of the recovery disk...  is the another method other then the one I described?

[callagrafx]

without resorting to format c: I'm not sure there is....sounds like something got entered into the registry which an uninstall didn't remove.

[cameron1991]

This happens because Windows sees all RAM (including pagefile and Video RAM) as system RAM and only allows a max of 4GB, so if you have 4GB installed in Physical RAM, Windows deducts the other RAM from the overall total of physical RAM.

So was there much point in the old days of SC4 before the datpacker in having the 4GB pagefile that the techy people at ST said would greatly increase system performance?
ie: would it have been better to have a 2GB pagefile if you had 2GB of physical RAM or would it have made no difference other than losing a few GBs from your HDD?

[callagrafx]

So was there much point in the old days of SC4 before the datpacker in having the 4GB pagefile that the techy people at ST said would greatly increase system performance?
ie: would it have been better to have a 2GB pagefile if you had 2GB of physical RAM or would it have made no difference other than losing a few GBs from your HDD?

In a word, nope.  It would have made no difference to the game or Windows to have such a large pagefile....Only if you had less than 2GB RAM would increasing the pagefile make any impact. By increasing the pagefile over 2GB with 2GB RAM installed, Windows would "not see" any overflow hardware RAM in favour of the pagefile, i.e. 2GB RAM, 3GB pagefile, windows would only use 1GB physical RAM.

Windows is actually pretty good at managing memory dynamically....I believe the problem was people simply overloaded their plugins, ran the game on high resolution with high detail across the board, but only had a bog-standard graphics card (which btw is included in any memory calculation).

[SC4BOY]

No one mentioned it, but the video memory (if you have a seperate card with its own memory) also gets subtracted from the system memory .. no matter where the memory comes from, the op system can only (for a 32 bit system) count up to [2 (exp) 32] -1.

[callagrafx]

No one mentioned it, but the video memory (if you have a seperate card with its own memory) also gets subtracted from the system memory .. no matter where the memory comes from, the op system can only (for a 32 bit system) count up to [2 (exp) 32] -1.

er....

This happens because Windows sees all RAM (including pagefile and Video RAM) as system RAM and only allows a max of 4GB, so if you have 4GB installed in Physical RAM, Windows deducts the other RAM from the overall total of physical RAM.