Where am I being bottlenecked the most?

[ChefOfDeath]

Hey, I'm running what's probably about a 4-5 year old system at this point, although I've upgraded it a little bit over the course of its life. I've got a Core 2 Duo E6600 (dual core 2.4 GHz), a 9800GTX, and 4 gigs DDR2 800. Here's the deal: I'm dual-booting XP 32-bit and Vista 64-bit, but I pretty much never use Vista on account of it being...well, Vista. However, my quirky-ass motherboard will only allow a 32-bit OS to see exactly 2 gigs of RAM, while a 64-bit OS gets the whole 4 (I know a 32-bit OS can't actually address a full 4 gigs of RAM, but I've seen other systems that will at least recognize 3 and change...). I've been playing MWLL on XP with 2 gigs of RAM, running @ 1440x900 and CCC level 3. Performance is acceptable in most cases, but it gets pretty choppy in big battles and I've been getting frequent CTD the whole time (I've only been playing for a few days, so I don't have experience with previous versions to compare). My question is this: will switching to Vista to open up those additional 2 gigs help much with either the in-game performance or CTD frequency? Or is the rest of my system too old to really have it make much difference? Since I never use Vista (don't think I've booted it on this comp in a couple years), I'll need to do a lot of housekeeping just to be able to run the game on it, not something I really want to bother with unless there's going to be a notable improvement compared to the current setup.

Oh and additionally, I use PPjoy which I hear doesn't play nice with 64-bit. Will I stand a chance of getting my joystick setup to work in Vista x64 Home Premium? The Wiki says that home editions can't change the driver code signing policy, is all that still the case?

[=KoS= 37]

I'm looking at upgrading from 2GB of ram and Windows XP 32bit to 64bit windows as well, I think that doing that alone will stop most of my crashing, since I seem to mostly crash

-when memory use gets high
-mostly since .4.x and later (i.e. with the additions TC, Deathvalley, and other stuff that presumably takes more RAM)
-and also in SA I crash every 10 minutes or so, I'm not as sure that this will go away

My specs are
Windows XP 32bit
2 GB RAM (2GB died)
core 2 duo e7200 @ 3.6 ghz
4870 1GB

If I upgrade soon, which is likely, I'll let you know if just going to W7 64bit and 4 GB of RAM fixes my issues.  At this point I'm just planning to do that since I think that'll help enough considering I ran okay before and I don't feel like spending $600-800 dollars on decent parts right now.

[ratbuddy]

Vista is light years ahead of XP. I know it's 'cool' to say it sucks, but most people who say that have no idea what they're talking about. Make the switch.

[Perigren]

i first ran mw:ll on core 2 duo system with a gt 7600 and 2 gigs of ram. i added a 3rd gig and it helped a bit,all on a 32 bit os,vista. never tried a 64 bit os on that rig. I am currently running win7 64 on whole new machine and let me tell you it is amazing! If you can get vista 64 bit to run it will most likely help with the crash issues but not the performance issues as your hardware is woefully inadequate.

[Come and See]

Vista is light years ahead of XP. I know it's 'cool' to say it sucks, but most people who say that have no idea what they're talking about. Make the switch.

I used Vista for 2 years. Never had any hiccups or problems with it.

Windows 7 imho is just Vista 2.0 dumbed down with less UAC harassment and the new taskbar.

[Rally]

I'm not saying this is the case or anything but it's possible that switching to a different OS version will clear away your CTD issues.

[sleepysheep]

Vista is light years ahead of XP. I know it's 'cool' to say it sucks, but most people who say that have no idea what they're talking about. Make the switch.

I used Vista for 2 years. Never had any hiccups or problems with it.

Windows 7 imho is just Vista 2.0 dumbed down with less UAC harassment and the new taskbar.

Wouldn't say dumbed down. But yeah Win 7 is basically Vista the way it should of been. I used Vista x64 since it was available till I eventually got Win 7 after I got a new PC. Never really had a problem with Vista x64, and at least driver support is still pretty good.

[Gremlich]

use joytokey for your js

[Freeborn_Toad]

I've used Vista, and I've been using Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 more or less since their release, and quite honestly, outside of DX10/11 they do absolutely nothing that I cannot do just as well with XP x64. Indeed, they do a few things worse (no globally adjustable setting for windows explorer views still pisses me off).

That said, DX10/11 is so omnipresent now that there is a compelling reason to have one of the newer OSes. I still think Vista is a clunky, bloated monstrosity of an OS (and 7 isn't that much better), but for gaming, it still has more utility than XP, at this point.

Regardless, 32-bit OSes are a disaster with modern hardware and Crysis, at least if you are using a decent GPU and play for more than an hour or two at a time. I ran into unsolvable memory addressing/driver issues, even when I was only using 3GiB of memory, on 32-bit windows, that were immediately solved by moving to a 64-bit OS (didn't matter what flavor of 64-bit Windows either).

I'm not familiar with PPjoy or joytokey, so I cannot comment on those.

[GB-72AT Talon]

XP was just terrible at a few critical things.  Memory management was one.  That dumbass OS would absolutely insist on raping your hard drive and would ignore that expensive memory (at the time XP was new) .  You can do tweaks to pagefile and whatnot to help but at the end of the day XP's memory allocation was shit compared to Vista or 7.

XP is also horrible in terms of fragmentation.  Of course, once again, you can modify it to auto defrag and whatnot but I expect more from the top of class OS.  XP was also terrible about letting shit files just get all left behind and all.  You have to spend time hunting down and deleting junk constantly with XP. After a while it gets slow no matter what you did.  I never had an XP install that lasted over a year and I used to build systems for myself and others.  Rule of thumb was if its got a bunch of crap on it and its slow it was more worth your time to just format and reinstall clean. 

I don't know why the OP wants to use Vista.  While it is much better than XP there's really no reason to use it when 7 x64 is the best choice today.

[Stahlseele]

maybe 'cause they got rid of the classical start menu and to a certain extent of the task bar? O.o
it's reason enough for ME not to put it on my main rig . . it's only on the old ones and the laptop because it needs less power . .

[CGB [CoffiNail]]

maybe 'cause they got rid of the classical start menu and to a certain extent of the task bar? O.o
it's reason enough for ME not to put it on my main rig . . it's only on the old ones and the laptop because it needs less power . .

can you not just activate both of these? I know the task bar can be made to show program names like it use too

[Stahlseele]

maybe 'cause they got rid of the classical start menu and to a certain extent of the task bar? O.o
it's reason enough for ME not to put it on my main rig . . it's only on the old ones and the laptop because it needs less power . .

can you not just activate both of these? I know the task bar can be made to show program names like it use too

Nope, you have to use 3rd party software for the Start-Menu at least.
The Task-Bar can be gotten right 95% with some creative windows tinkering.

[=CJW= Rad Hanzo]

Make Vista64 your prime OSsince youve got it already.
Its just being said it was a shitty OS by many a user, but thats something im not believing(it still can bitch around...but tell me which OS doesnt bitch from time to time).
The 64 bit will give you huge advantages when it comes to the requirements of modern games, and do NOT be fooled : MWLL is top of the pops in this regard. Even gives really cranked up PCs something to work.

Upgrade your CPU and GPU: both bottlenecks, sadly.

[(TLL)Frosted]

I deactivated every eye candy for vista it piratically looks like 98.

I also never had issue with vista but I also didn't buy early on so it got time to get patched.