Where am I being bottlenecked the most?

[~SJ~ Xarg Talasko]

XP 32-bit and Vista 64-bit
Core 2 Duo E6600 (dual core 2.4 GHz)
9800GTX
4 gigs DDR2 800

I've placed these in order of what I think is the most important.
1. Use Vista 64, the extra ram does help.
2. MWLL seems cpu limited up to about 3.3-3.4ghz, you would get an amazing boost by upping these mhz (through an upgrade to a quad with high clock speed, or overclocking your C2D if possible).
3. Until you get higher speed, this card won't be your bottleneck.. but when you do, this is the next offender on the list.
4. Upgrading this won't help much, but it would help things load faster.

Now, I know you didn't come here asking for upgrade advice, that's just my take on it all, from reading this subforum and personal experience. Now, on your questions...

quirky-ass motherboard will only allow a 32-bit OS to see exactly 2 gigs of RAMve been getting frequent CTD the whole time

As noted by the developers sometime during the 0.4.x lifecycle, the debugging DLL's returned that OVER HALF of the crashes in the game were caused by insufficient memory.... you do the maths

(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?

The error reports indicate yes, at the very worst, it can't hurt to try, right?

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.

If it gets you a hefty stability increase (via the extra RAM) then I'd say it's worth it... can only take an hour or two tops, short of having very slow internet for patch downloads :p

[Eximo]

I would have to agree on the CPU being the bottleneck. I know my old system, Athlon X2 6000 at 3.0Ghz with 6GB of ram was pegged at 100% CPU when I ran MWLL.

It's not so much the Ghz rating, but the architecture and features of the newer chips that make all the difference. You can really only use the clock to compare CPUs from the same line.

[ChefOfDeath]

Thanks for the advice everybody.

I've managed to convince myself to upgrade (sadly  ). I was gonna try to put in a newer video card and processor, but it would still be limited by the motherboard that I have. Since it only cost about $280 more than what I was gonna do anyway, I decided to go all out and get a new motherboard, core i5, and ddr3 memory to go with the new video card (probably gonna be an HD 6950 unlocked to 6970 specs), and win7 x64. Think I'll get a solid-state for my boot drive, plus I can put Crysis Wars on it and load MWLL in seconds. 

It'll take me 3 or 4 weeks to save up the money for it though, so in the meantime I'm gonna see if I can tinker around with Vista some. The main problem I have with Vista is the way it eats up space - I gave it a 40 gig partition on my HDD thinking that was plenty for an OS install. It was fine initially, but it turns out that every time you update it, it ends up taking ten times the space that it claims to have needed. I believe this is thanks to the winsxs ("windows side-by-side") folder, which keeps backup copies of all the crap that gets replaced every time you update...and there's no way to stop or get rid of it. Of the 40 gigs I allocated to that partition, 33 of them are being taken up by the OS and basic driver and software installs for my hardware - and the winsxs folder is taking up 13.5 GB alone. I had to delete the one single real program I had on there (vanilla Crysis) the last time I tried to update Vista, even though I started with something like 3 gigs free, and Windows claimed that the update needed 400 MB. Anyway, that's my gripe with Vista.

[sleepysheep]

Thanks for the advice everybody.

I've managed to convince myself to upgrade (sadly  ). I was gonna try to put in a newer video card and processor, but it would still be limited by the motherboard that I have. Since it only cost about $280 more than what I was gonna do anyway, I decided to go all out and get a new motherboard, core i5, and ddr3 memory to go with the new video card (probably gonna be an HD 6950 unlocked to 6970 specs), and win7 x64. Think I'll get a solid-state for my boot drive, plus I can put Crysis Wars on it and load MWLL in seconds. 

It'll take me 3 or 4 weeks to save up the money for it though, so in the meantime I'm gonna see if I can tinker around with Vista some. The main problem I have with Vista is the way it eats up space - I gave it a 40 gig partition on my HDD thinking that was plenty for an OS install. It was fine initially, but it turns out that every time you update it, it ends up taking ten times the space that it claims to have needed. I believe this is thanks to the winsxs ("windows side-by-side") folder, which keeps backup copies of all the crap that gets replaced every time you update...and there's no way to stop or get rid of it. Of the 40 gigs I allocated to that partition, 33 of them are being taken up by the OS and basic driver and software installs for my hardware - and the winsxs folder is taking up 13.5 GB alone. I had to delete the one single real program I had on there (vanilla Crysis) the last time I tried to update Vista, even though I started with something like 3 gigs free, and Windows claimed that the update needed 400 MB. Anyway, that's my gripe with Vista.

You can't flash 6950 to 6970 anymore, ATI fixed it. And the chances of you getting an old 6950 is the same chance of finding a needle in a haystack. So I really wouldn't aim to do that.

[shadowkiller]

Go for the 2500k sandy bridge cpu. Its only about $200 and its a freaking monster. I have my 2500k OCed to 4.5 ghz with a cheap aftermarket heatsink ($40, stock one sucks) and i never go over 55C under load. It also powers through anything you can throw at it. Also, dont buy that video card for the express purpose of flashing the bios to upgrade, ati fixed it so you cant do it anymore. Do some shopping around and read reviews on some videocards before you decide which one to buy. Dont get anything less then 1gb memory, just a waste of money.