Call of Duty 4: Can I tweak it to force more precaching for my slow hard drive?

[Raptor007]

I have Call of Duty 4 loaded on two PCs: a desktop and a laptop. The desktop runs the game wonderfully, with no noticeable slowdowns ever. The laptop (at lower settings) keeps pretty decent framerates, but will often stutter when new resources are loaded (especially sounds). The first round of multiplayer is always awful on the laptop.

The issue is probably not RAM, because the desktop has only 2GB DDR400 while the laptop now has 4GB DDR667. I also don't think it's the video card, because reducing resolution and textures didn't help. I believe the limiting factor here is the hard drive. My desktop has two 7200rpm drives (boot and swap on one, software on the other) where the laptop has everything on a single 5400rpm drive.

So my question is, can I force the laptop to precache more resources in Call of Duty 4? I would much rather wait a little longer at the loading screen than get these choppy spots in the middle of gameplay. It's getting me killed a lot.

Desktop Specs:

• nForce 4 SLI 939
• AMD Opteron 180 (2.4GHz dual-core)
• GeForce 8800GT 512MB
• 2GB DDR400 2-3-2-5
• 250GB Hitachi 7200rpm SATA
• 750GB Hitachi 7200rpm SATA
• Windows XP 32-bit

Laptop Specs:

• MacBook Pro 2007
• Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
• GeForce 8600M GT 512MB
• 4GB DDR667 4-4-4-12
• 500GB Seagate 5400rpm SATA
• Windows 2003 32-bit (also tried XP 32-bit, same problem and only 3GB memory addressable)

 

[kuyaglen]

I dont think so. Maybe if you reformatted and have COD4 as the first thing you uploaded...that way all the files are on the fastest (outer part) of the hard drive.

 

[KayossZero]

I dont think so. Maybe if you reformatted and have COD4 as the first thing you uploaded...that way all the files are on the fastest (outer part) of the hard drive.

You don't need to reformat to accomplish that task, simply install a good Defragger such as Ultimate Defrag or another.

Certainly though OP your choices are really straight forward, #1 Reduce the Pagefile to something small like 64MB (so certain games/Applications still work) and #2 as mentioned above prioritize OS and game files to the outer tracks of the HD where speed is much much faster and you'll notice the benefit.

 

[Raptor007]

I dont think so. Maybe if you reformatted and have COD4 as the first thing you uploaded...that way all the files are on the fastest (outer part) of the hard drive.

That's a good idea, though since it's on a different partition from my Windows boot I can probably move things around without formatting. Do you happen to know if the outer part of the hard drive is the beginning or end?

You don't need to reformat to accomplish that task, simply install a good Defragger such as Ultimate Defrag or another.

Certainly though OP your choices are really straight forward, #1 Reduce the Pagefile to something small like 64MB (so certain games/Applications still work) and #2 as mentioned above prioritize OS and game files to the outer tracks of the HD where speed is much much faster and you'll notice the benefit.

Thanks for the tips; I will definitely look into a better defragmenter. I hate how the Windows built-in defrag tool doesn't consolidate free space.

Now, why do you suggest making the pagefile smaller? I was under the impression that Windows would be smart enough not to use it unless it had to, so I gave it a 4GB page file -- that way, the page file would never have to be expanded, so it would not get fragmented.