[Makemineadouble]

I ordered my copy from Amazon yesterday:

Sid Meiers Railroad

I figure £17.99 is a fair price considering the amount of use it's going to get.

 

[Makemineadouble]

I've had my copy of Sid Meier's RailRoads for several days now so a few observations.

I've worked my way through most of the manual although I don't regard myself as totally proficent yet.

This program hogs memory and will tax your PC like no other. The program will crash unless you are proactive and setup your program and PC of optimial running.

I had to replace my current Nvidia drivers - not for the faint hearted and reinstall.

My current PC has 2 megs of ram, and a 350 gig harddrive it's about 6 months old and it just about runs this program.

Railroads is'nt quite as good as the orginal Railroad tycoon, (IMHO) play isnt quite as complex, but it does run very well.

Routing is handled a little differently, trains can't double back on them selves, so you have to design your track layout to suit. Industries are similified, and there no buying of hotels at stations. Rather buy industries. The graphics as you would expect are superb. I've only tried the one player version so far as this is a great way to learn how it runs.

Would I buy it again - YES I Would

 

[dwb]

>My current PC has 2 megs of ram
I assume this is a typo and you mean 2 gigabytes?

>it's about 6 months old and it just about runs this program.
What graphics card are you using? I suspect that if it haven't got one at least one of the mid to high end latest chip card, that might be the source of the difficulty.

>Would I buy it again - YES I Would
That's always the best recommendation

Thanks
David

 

[Makemineadouble]

Nvidia GEforce 6200se. When I bought this PC I didnt buy as a games machine. My main activity is the share market and futures plus a bit of mail.

 

[dwb]

>Nvidia GEforce 6200se. When I bought this PC I didnt buy as a games machine
When my son bought a new PC in summer 2005 for word processing and a bit of Championship Manager, he chose a graphics chip that shared motherboard RAM. About this time last year, he got the latest version of Civilisation or similar, I forget which one and found it just couldn't cut the mustard on the game graphics. It would stutter, crash and so on. He was given an ATI card costing ~ £110 for Christmas and everything has been fine since.

David

 

[Makemineadouble]

Well I've totally stuffed my PC with the advised changes, and thats a big problem. Think I'll cut my losses and replace the video card, and possibly the hard drive as well. It's contaminated with a backup partition that I tried to bypass last time when I installed XP pro. these PC world jobs arn't up to much really. Forunately I have a top rate back up PC laying on the floor with an empty drive Its just a *** having to restore everything, and setup a network again. This may take a while......................... meanwhile I'll have to share PC's with Mrs W.......

 

[Doug]

One of the ways that I extend the life of a PC is to swap out the video card and double up on RAM about two years after getting the PC. It can just about keep up with the pace of the latest software for another two or three years then I get a new machine.

Always get the best that you can afford.

 

[dwb]

>two years... another two or three years
That makes five. I guess at six years old this PC is well and truly past it, but I'm going to hang on until I can one with Vista already on it.

David

 

[Makemineadouble]

That was my plan last year

. Hang on until the next piece of Gates wonder software.

Then I had a hardrive disintegrate so a change was forced on me, so I has the PC rebuilt for use as a spare/possible RR&Co for the new layout.
As an interim step I bought a PC from PC world. Not realising that I couldn't simply change XP home with XP pro as they have a nasty little secret partition on the HD for restoring. It got very ugly, as they don't give you drivers these days you got it all on the partion. My next PC will come from a local guy to my spec, where I get the operating software,and any driver necessary. I used driver detective to find all the drivers I lost and eventially got things up and running again. Anyway it this PC which is currently down, and which Im going to replace the graphic's card on, maybe even the drive, as I cannot access my data at all. I've lost the complete graphical interface, the only thing I have is task manager. MY dos is now so old I've forgotten most of it.

Oh well another day, and another PC as they say.
Mass celebrations as I see this my 500th post................................ now what do I get for that.

 

[dwb]

Compared to this PC mullarchy DCC is easy!

>Mass celebrations as I see this my 500th post................................ now what do I get for that
You get an extra square and called an engine driver. Next stop 1000 and station master. Early promotion is rapid. It's a hard slog from fireman...

David

 

[Makemineadouble]

It's been another day of PC pleasure, plodding along fighting XP's security features, CA Security Suite (oh bliss) and the security features of internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. I'm beinging to wonder who's paranoid, it's not me so it must Gates and Co. One sneaky little tick box held up my progress for nearly four hours, and every time a reboot was called for another sneaky feature slowed down an already slow proceedure. I never managed to get any work done with all these features to fight. Perhaps Gates planned it this way. It's a mine field. I just want my PC back in one piece. Soon. On Mrs W's PC (which I'm using) multi tasking really slows things down, I find this very frustrating.