Question About Memory and CPU and Gamez and yeah

So you people are smart about things and stuff. My laptop has 512 of RAM in it, two chips of 256 each. I'm playing Morrowind, which my computer can certainly handle, but the thing is I'm using this GIGANTIC list of addons for it. More than a gig worth or extra stuff, and loading times are taking forever now and the framerate is slowing down and it's just being all slow and shit.


So, like, the problem can't be my videocard, then, right? It's an old game, and it works perfectly fine without the addons.

So, would upgrading my ram (say, getting two 512 MB chips, and doubling my RAM) improve the performance of the game in this case?

I wasn't completely sure because I'm not a computer genius, and I wasn't sure if CPU usage was directly related to RAM or if there were other factors, because when Morrowind is running CPU usage is a constant 100%, and I think that's what's slowing shit down.

Help?

Pretty much any game even if it's from like 1999 will 100% your cpu, as it'll try to display it as smoothly as it possibly can, well above what you'll really notice (like 20-30fps+)

Uh whats your laptops cpu speed ?_? Is it on par with what the game says it needs or like above it ?_?

More ram would always help anyway, even for stuff that doesn't necessarily need it. Everything was faster once I upgraded to a gb of ram, and some stuff very noticeably =o

Oh yeah, whats the graphics card chip in it ?_?

Nearly all laptop graphics chips "steal" your main computer's ram, instead of having their own ram, so, yeah, more ram++

Here's the game's requirements:

Minimum system requirements:
Windows ME/98 128 MB RAM; Windows XP/2000 256 MB RAM; 500 MHz Intel Pentium III, Celeron, or AMD Athlon processor; 8x CD/DVD-ROM Drive; 1 GB free hard disk space; Windows swapfile; DirectX 8.1 (included); 32MB Direct3D Compatible video card and DirectX 8.1 compatible driver; DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card; Keyboard; Mouse

Recommended:
800 MHz or faster Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor; 256 MB RAM; NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS, or ATI Radeon 7500 or faster video card.

Supported video card chipsets*:
NVIDIA GeForce4; NVIDIA GeForce3; NVIDIA GeForce2; NVIDIA GeForce 256; NVIDIA TNT2; ATI Radeon 8500; ATI Radeon 7500; ATI Radeon 7200; ATI Radeon; ATI Rage 128; Matrox G550; Matrox G450; Matrox G400

I have a Pentium 4 2.20 GHz CPU, and a GeForce4 4200. I'm above the minimum AND the recommended. Like I said before, in small areas it's beautiful and smooth, but when it gets into one of those large town area, made even larger by the gigantic addon pack I'm using, it slows down a lot. Like, it'll take forever to load, and will be nice and smooth while I look around until I look in the direction of a lot of, uh, stuff. Even if it's out of my view distance, it still gets choppy for a few seconds and then it's smooth again. And this goes on and off like that.

And it also lags a lot when the music changes.

So I really think it's a RAM thing. Which bring up another issue with my laptop.

I have 512 MB of RAM in it, but it still has some trouble handling stupid shit like gif's in firefox and crap like that. Something's almost always hogging the CPU for some weird reason. It got better after I updated a bunch of stuff  but it really seems like it's running kinda slow for 512 MB of RAM.

SUCCESS!!

It runs sooo much better now!

Lol, good for you.

I know on my computer I always exceed stuff, but my graphics card doesnt have pixel shading, so it cant run games very smoothly...
damn intergrated.

Possibly you have the old 7.1 version of AVG Free? Whenever that did it's scheduled scan, it would use up your processor and RAM, and make your Hard Drive become extremely noisy

my AVG updates every time I turn my computer on, which is every day.

7.5.something

But now that you mention it, it is running a scan EVERY DAMN TIME I START UP. And I can make it stop, but I can't tell it to not do it every damn time the computer turns on. =\


But no, that's not the problem, because as you can see the problem was already fixed when I got more RAM. End of Story. Speed issue solved. There is no more speed issue. That has been resolved. NO SPEED ISSUE NO MORE.