Atomic Systems

Hi All,

Can I pick some ones brains who is more computer knowladgable than me, I have have just bought a WD external 250Gb hard drive, and want to run MSTS from it.

The questions are I have unstored every thing from trainstore, do I now just copy MSTS & Trainstore & Conbuilder over to the new drive?, after keeping a back up of all 3 files or is there more to it than that.

Any help will be very appreciated, I'm a complete idiot when technical things with comuters are concerened, I only bought the external hard drive as the internal one is running out of space.

Michael Hendle

MSTS won't run as well from your external drive if it is USB2. A firewire one would speed things up, but I prefer an internal SATA drive.

You can copy the MSTS folder over to the external drive but the registry settings won't be correct. It is not difficult to modify these but you don't sound too confident. Perhaps someone may encourage you, though I don't want to take it any further since I don't want to feel responsible if you get it wrong.

The easiest way is to reinstall MSTS from the original CD's. There are various installation options and you can choose a minimal one. You can then copy your MSTS folder on top of this one (the new MSTS folder on the external drive) so long as everything has been unstored from Train Store prior to doing so.

As for Train Store and Conbuilder I would reinstall them from the original zips. It's very quick.

Mark

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your advice at present I think I will leave well alone, I just thought by moving MSTS to the extra hard drive it would speed things up.

Mike Hendle

I'm not an MSTS guru at all, but I know my winders.

Best bet as follows.....
Leave trainstore and other ancilliary utils on C:, they're small anywaY ( although, having not yet used trainsore, I do not know where it keeps it's archives).

Copy your MSTS to a temp folder, (or just rename it to c:\program files\macroshaft games\Train Simulator-full but copying it would make the next stage go better)

Uninstall MSTS

Re-install MSTS to your external drive. Install patches, updates and anything else that might write to the registry.
Now just drop your old installation on top of the new on on the external drive.

Depending on exactly how trainstore works, follow the same basic procedure for it too.

Altough reading from an external drive is a little slower, you may still gain a benefit because any paging to the swapfile will be happening on a different drive, which is on a totally different bus, so readin new files will not have to wait each time the system writes to swap.

Trains store has to be on the same drive as MSTS, as do the files it stores. If not it would take an age to store and unstore since the files would actually be transferred from one drive to another. Its success, as a utility, has in no small way been due to the speed with which Train Store performs its operations.

Mark

Hi , Just do what I did and shift everything else that is not related to MSTS
to the External drive ,a lot easier, no problems loading anything new and everything seems to run sweeter

Regards

Ron P