Hi all

I seem to have developed a strange problem when changing tracks and closing LFS. This problem occured before the new patch and also occurs with the new patch with my previous installation and a new installation.

Heres what happens, LFS loads fine, I go to the track selection then select Fern Bay for example (the track name doesn't matter it happens on all tracks). LFS appears to hang, or atleast thats what I thought, I fired up task manager and what seems to be happening is the CPU allocated for LFS hits around 98% and LFS seems to be unloading its memory very very slowly, when it has unloaded the track data for the current track it then starts to load the new track as normal and then LFS is back to normal as if nothing has gone wrong. Once the track has loaded I can change configuration fine, it is just the changing of tracks which causes this issue.

The same applies to closing LFS, I go to close it by selecing Exit then press Yes, LFS hangs for ages before the credits appear where I can click to close it. It seems to do the same thing here, the memory allocation goes down very slowly until the game is unloaded from memory then it seems to sort itself out.

The unloading of memory can take up to a minute which is very slow

I am starting to think I may have a hardware fault somewhere either in memory or on the hard drive but before I can confirm this I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem.

Any help is greatly appreciated because it is very frustrating.

Cheers

peeps

from experience, my brother has a slow hard drive and everytime the track is changed on an online game, his HD takes so long to load the new track that he lags out.

not quite the same problem as a full blown crash or hang, but still, a slow HD might be it.

How much RAM is in your box? Windows memory management is poor so it might be swapping. Slow HDD will make that worse of course.

I am pretty sure it's not the speed of the memory or drive, LFS is installed on my 7200 rpm 80gig drive and I have another main drive for my OS which is a 10,000 rpm 36gb drive so there isn't any swap issues and I have 1gb of DDR 400 memory.

I don't seem to have any problems with other games which is why I find it strange. It just suddenly start with LFS one day and its done it ever since

If it is a hardware fault then the way in which LFS is loaded and unloaded may be causing the problem.

I guess i'll have to try a few things with my computer setup to try and isolate the problem.

Oh well, if anyone has any more ideas please let me know.