being a win98 user still, i bow to your expertise sir. didnt know about winxp's need not to defrag - but the more info the better i am sure...

regards

Now when I was a DOS, Win9x, ME user I defragged religiously. It certainly helped alot on FAT and FAT32 file systems.

Defragging before installing will help to ensure your game's software is in one contiguous set of data blocks on the HDD.

Even on modern systems, large and CPU and FPS demanding sims like Falcon4, LockOn, MSFS9 and others do benefit from less disk thrashing.

For sims like LB2 where most of it can be resident within our 512 and 1 Gig RAM, its not so much an issue. However, note the difference between LB2 maps installed on the HDD versus on the CDROM, what a big differnce in access time there is there.

I noticed a huge speed increase just by having both disks, turned into Iso's and loaded using dameware tools mounted as cd1 and cd2. Its very very fast compared to accessing the cdroms.

A HD will beat a CDROM anyday! Mounting the ISO's is a great way to go with LB2. Besides, you can keep the precious originals stored in a safe place.

`DGVoodoo question:
On my widescreen laptop it natively uses 1680x1050 resolution. When I initially used the laptops original drivers, DGVoodoo showed me a selectable 1680x1050 resolution and the game was widescreen. I then updated my laptops ATI 9700 pro drivers to ATI's Cat 5_12 drivers. Now, even though my laptops "desktop" resolution is set to 1680x1050, when I open DGvoodoo's interface, it shows that my laptop is set to 1680x1050, but of the resolutions I can select in the drop-down box, the maximum is 1400x1050.
Question: is there a file I can edit for DGVoodoo that will allow me to play the game widescreen at 1680x1050 versus playing it with the current resolution where I have black bars on both sides?

I think dgvoodoo fetches video-resolutions from DirectX. Can you add 1680x1050 in your video-drivers as a custom resolution?

I remember a while back that I was unable to select 1280x960 in Hidden & Dangerous 2, but in Windows I had that resolution. So I added 1280x960 to the Forceware-drivers as a custom-res, then I was able to select that res in-game.
I don't know the capabilities of ATI's drivers though.

Thanks Shadow, I will look around the ATI panels to see if I can add it somewhere.
Makes sense.

Is anyone using dgVoodoo 1.40 with ATI's newest driver release (5.13)? I'm following the instructions from the speichts.com site and I've gotten the game to run with software rendering. Everytime I try to get the dgVoodoo setup program to run, I just get an error message from windows and it shuts down dgVoodoo before it can even load up. I've yet to see the set up window that's shown in this thread.

EDIT - I'm running an ATI X800XL with an A64 3500+ and 2gigs of ram. LB2 was installed to the default location (C:/Janes/Longbow2/)

Hmm, something wrong with dgVoodoo then if you can't run setup, have you tried the other wrapper instead?