ram

[ssjdeathlord]

Well, I have 224mb of ram, 36 mb of it must have just dissappeared into cyber-space! As you well know, Dawn of War requires 256mb of ram. I was wondering if anyone could tell me how to get around this requirement? Or maybe how to find that lost mb of ram?

[vj8usa]

The other 32MB is (almost certainly) being used by your integrated video. Post your dxdiag output and we can confirm that. Get more RAM, and a new video card too if you can.

[ssjdeathlord]

Oh, I know that the intergrated video is th problem now. But I refuse to put any money into this laptop when I have a state if the art tower at home. Though, I will spend hours pouring over the startup code to find the reqs and delete them. That is, if someone woulda be gracious enough to tell me where the damn thing is hidden.

[Kwinghammer]

Deathlord;

.... Dude, no offense or anything, but for all intents and purposes you really can't change the requirements of a game by tricking its installer or configuration executable into thinking you have them (but don't). It's just a matter of ability. Should for some reason you actually do manage to give the requirement check the slip (and the only way I can think of to do it manually would be to decompile and recompile certain data files, which AFAIK is against the game's EULA) and install DoW/WA, your performance will probably be terrible, even on low settings.

Believe me, I sympathize with you; I had my current rig built when its components were top-of-the-line about 13 months ago, and my previous computer was an old Pentium 166MHz with a quarter of the system RAM than what's in my current rig's video card alone. The best I could do for performance was Quake 2 at 640x480 and everything on low, and it _still_ hiccupped regularly. I couldn't even play MP3s without Winamp skipping. When I got my aforementioned megarig and got used to the kind of increase in raw computing power and capability that came with it, it was like an epiphany, nothing less. This got me to thinking about my old rig. Maybe feeling a bit greedy myself, I wanted to upgrade the heck out of her and have two swell boxes. But after a while, I resented that thought. I'd passed that car, climbed higher than it could ever go, and while I did use her once or twice since getting my new rig, she's more 'just in case' now rather than 'significant'.

If it's worth saying, I'd just party down with your megatower at home. While you can find laptops that will run a given FPS or RTS as well as a really good regular rig, and having the whole package needed for a LAN in a 5lb hardshell is pretty cool, I agree that investing in improving your homebox is a better option. The way you've described your laptop makes me think it probably wasn't made for gaming , not for the most part.

If you don't mind, would you rez up your dxdiag.txt for your laptop? I'm curious as to its configuration and innards.

-In Nomine Imperium;
-Kwinghammer.

[TBS]

I dont know of anyone who has managed to trick the game into bypassing the memory requirements check. Feel free to experiment, but I dont think anyone here will be able to help you.

Even if you do manage it Kwinghammer is quite right - the game would run terribly, personally I wouldnt want to run DoW with less than 512Mb of RAM (some people do manage with 256Mb but it definately isnt optimal).

[Kwinghammer]

TBS, Deathlord;

So you know, DL, my current rig runs with about a GB of system RAM, and I've found some heavy 4-player DoW games can still stress it down. I find it easily likely that running DoW with less than a quarter of that thus would slow playspeed down to a crawl, quite unplayable. More often than not a taxing of such hardware in recent Windows-variety OSes- including my own XP64- will crash the system if the load gets that heavy. I will submit that I've found XP64 with my current config is considerably more stable than, say, my old system with Windows 98, and I generally don't have more than one or two stablecrashes per 3-4 operating days (occasionally solid).

-In Nomine Imperium;
-Kwinghammer.