The old Pentium 3 enhancements option

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

I have a P4 2.4g dual core, 256m of ram, and an ati radeon with 64m on the board, but should I increase the cpu ram as I recall from the manual it can support up to like 2g. Would that help BZII run better. I understand that BZII is mainly cpu driven, so would more memory help move things along faster during game play? Tanks, BNG. The video board is not that great, but is faster then the original integrated one that came with my pc...just thought I'd ask as I've installed extra memory and other components on past systems without problems.

[GSH]

Windows XP really needs 512+MB to begin to run smoothly; at 256MB ram, you've barely got enough to start Windows without it hitting the HD pretty hard. With RAM prices *dirt cheap*, you can usually get 2GB of RAM for $15-30. (Granted, if you've got a oddball memory format, it can be more expensive. And if your MB choice is anything like your choice of modder's tools, BNG, you're very likely to have an oddball memory format.)

I'd go to http://www.crucial.com/ or http://www.kingston.com/ to figure out what type of memory your system takes. Then, take their part #s, and go to http://www.newegg.com and get the same thing for a little less. I don't go for the cheapest RAM makers, as they tend to flake out, but Kingston's been quite reliable for me. My rule of thumb: if you can max out your ram for $30 or so, do it. It'll make everything faster.

-- GSH

[Zero Angel]

Yes, most definitely increase the memory. One reason why most AV's bog down a computer is becaus they consume a lot of memory (expect your average antivirus to use at least 128MB of RAM with all of its background processes and services put together, some of them like McAfee consume around 256MB) The windows XP kernel and default services probably consumes a little over 128MB on its own, so that taken together with an antivirus, expect things to slow down because both of those things want to use up all your RAM, which causes most of your system's resources dedicated to constantly accessing the swap file your hard disk which slows EVERYTHING down. Upgrading to 512 will speed up your Windows XP quite noticably, and 1GB will speed it up even further, after that the returns diminish quite a bit unless you're doing tasks which really tax the memory (like editing large, multi-layered images in photoshop or playing high-end games).