Another performance issue / questionFollow

Hello all. Its my first post here for EQ2. I played EQ1 for a while back in the day on Rallos Zek, when men were men and Darkenbane were still a guild to be feared. Quit and began playing EQ2 this past week, but I'm having some performance issues I was hoping some of you could give advice on.

My system is, well, not up to the task, I admit. I am running a HP Pavilion, quite dated.

1.8 gig processor
256 meg DDR Ram
ATI Radeon 128 meg video card.
Standard cable connection

Now, when I installed it, it ran, although the framerate was obscene. I was able to play on the isle of refuge but once I get to Qeynos, it became unplayable...literally. I went out and bought another stick of 512 ram (bring total to 700+), hoping it would increase performance. I have not noticed a difference AT ALL. I'm running on extreme performance with all of my settings on low, to ensure optimal performance.

I'm not really concerned about seeing the graphics at a super high level of detail. I just want to playthe game, but I fear I wasted my money on ram that didn't make playability any better. A friend of mine is running EQ2 better on his laptop with a 64 meg card and 512 ram and a 1.5 gig processor. Just a little miffed that I was running 256 megs short of the RECOMMENDED specs, and the game was unplayable.

Anyhow...I'm rambling on. Any suggestions at all would be greatly appreciated, keeping in mind that I can't spend another $300 to play this single game. Thanks in advance!

Edited, Fri Nov 19 11:01:03 2004 by MURedskin

RAM RAM RAM RAM and more RAM

at the very LEAST 512, but up to 1gig and youll be set.

Also, something I found works for me - at least gave me a little more performance - was, if you are running winxp, go to performance settings and set each drive to have a os managed swap.

It should, by default, give you the same space you have in RAM on each hdd. I am running 3 drives, so I have 3 swaps that windows will manage, increasing and decreasing as needed, each starting at 768mb.

I have pretty much zero lag.

My specs are, 1.6 ghz athlon, 768mb ram, radeon 9700 pro. one 19" CRT and one 19" plasma.

What video card do you have (Model)? Get your memory up to a gig, and depending on your vid card, you should be good.