Thought my system was good, but still getting lag...

[Basherz]

Chris
Somewhere above he did say he was running a Pentium D probably dual core.
A couple of things the 3.3GB of RAM is throttling his cpu Win 7 64 likes to see around 4GB in matched pairs (2 x 2Gb), I don't know what configuration the OP has got that 3.3 GB in, but it ain't helping. His video card is being throttled by the cpu, ie the cpu can't deliver the data fast enough for that card. The RAM I would guess will be a DDR1 variety which is extremely slow even when compared to today's DDR3 modules, another bottleneck.

Agreed Peter. The RAM, or lack of, stood out to me like a sore thumb, and as you said, or implied, to enable "dual channel", then these should be 2 x equal sticks.

I do this with all of my important programs due to Windows needlessly corrupting or going wrong all the time and forcing me to reinstall everything.

To me, that indicates an underlying problem with either the machine, the Windows installation or indeed the user---if we could identify what's going wrong there and fix it rather than work round it I'm sure there'd be an improvement. Windows 7 is a very stable operating system, and works well on even low spec'd machines so a Pentium D should move along just fine, albeit for RW not at a record breaking speed.

Think you may have hit the nail on the head there Gary.

[Glen85]

Thankyou to everyone for your replies and advice, I've read through all those posts and am very grateful for your help. For now *touches wood* I appear to have resolved the major issues with the booster program I mentioned. It turns out that Windows is running a LOT of unnecessary rubbish in the background, which is strangling the life out of the machine. With these needless processes killed off, along with anything else which I don't need while I'm actually playing, it seems to run really rather well! I've even been able to nudge a few settings up a notch or two! I'm still getting roughly the same FPS readings as before, but hardly any of the lag, even when travelling at high speeds in the rain!

From past experiences, I'd really rather have all my important data on an external drive (or a secondary internal drive) as I've lost countless gigs of stuff in the past, on various machines. This one, however, has only REALLY played up once since I've had it, and that was on the basic 32-bit installation of 7. Since I've been using x64 it's been pretty smooth running. Also, I might just add that, since I've not bothered to use any anti-virus software besides Microsoft's, I've had no major issues whatsoever. Might seem a bit backward, but hey, it works for me, lol!

If all keeps going smoothly, I think I'll leave this be, as I'll be upgrading my system in a few months anyway; I'm emigrating and leaving tons of stuff behind, including my PC. I might well come back here and start asking about system specs for a gaming rig towards the end of this year or the beginning of next, lol! I'll definitely have a go at defragging the external drive and do some other things suggested, as it can only help, but I'm not going to push it to get any better with RW performance for now.

Again, thankyou so much for all the helpful advice; it's really refreshing to see an online community for games/sims that's so eager to help out a newbie! I've been a member of many forums and moderated on a few, where there's a very negative attitude to new members or users to the software. Thankyou for making me feel welcome here!