Loadtimes!

Indeed, I was under the impression that all source games cached once, then never again. This doesn't seem to be the case with Empires.

I've seen a "Pre-loading/caching whatever" on all source games except Empires. Maybe this has something to do with it.

 

I defragmented my hard drive today and Empires loads a whole lot faster.

 

This has already been done, actually. Since DOS. Its called RAM Drive.

[edit]
Heres a link to a page where some people discussed RAM drives, some intelligent, others not-so intelligent.
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/7663/

 

Greetings,

I have never read this thread before but i recently formated my PC after trying many combinationsof IDE driver thinking that it was just me with the incredibly slow load time.

I have an NF4 chipset motherboard and was using the nVidia SW IDE drivers, these would often cause my sound to stutter really badly at the start of a map.

I also dropped my sound acceleration down by 1 notch in DXDIAG to "Full"

THis seems to have got rid of some of the slow down.

Removing the nVidia driver for the IDE and using the basic Microsoft ones makes everything really damn slow now, especially booting XP takes me over a minute.

ANYWAY i think ill go back to the SW IDE drivers if everyone is loading so slow i dont feel so bad lol.

im running it all in high with 1600x1200 and HDR so i spose ill have to learn to live with it