Medieval extreme loading time

[Victuz]

Yesterday I decided to play Medieval:TW again (which is my favourite in the series) so I found the "Golden edition total war" (with medieval and shogun on it) dusted it off and put it into the disc reader.
Installation went OK but now I'm facing a major problem. The game takes AGES to load the main champaign (at first I thought it crashes but it actually loads!) I don't know what's causing it. Just to check I found a timer, started the game, turned it on and started reading the book. It took the game 23 minutes to load the champaign map!
Honestly it wouldn't be all that terrible if it was a one time thing but than I did the same thing I do with every TW game, after starting the game I save . So I entered the menu again (dumbass), saved and tried coming into the game. 20 minutes this time.

I don't know what might be causing this trouble, I have the game set up at highest possible resolution & quality but I fiddled with it and that seemed to have no effect whatsoever. I also noticed that the game is using only one of my 2 cores (what can you expect from a 9 years old game :3) so I turned off the affinity for second one, didn't help either. I'm fresh out of ideas and I don't know what to do. I want to play the damn game! But I'm not going to wait 20 minutes after every battle to get back into the map xP.

PS. I remember playing the game around a year ago on the same computer it worked ok. Only thing I did since than was increasing the ram from 2 to 4gb (and changing heaphones ;P) so it seems to be a software problem. Not hardware one.

[Stazi]

Some of these tricks below may help (winXP 32-bit):
1. AGP memmory slider to 0
2. dxdiag.exe > turn off AGP acceleration
3. msconfig.exe > BOOT.INI > adv.options > /MAXMEM try lowest possible or physically remove 2gb of your ram
4. msconfig.exe > BOOT.INI > adv.options > /NUMPROC you can try reduce to 1. I doubt it'll help cause multi core cpus are usually not a problem.
5. Run the game in window (kind of) - add D to the shortcut path to look like: "D:\Medieval - Total War\Medieval_TW.EXE" D

Too much video memory (over 512mb) can cause problems too but it's hard to do something about it.

Of course, the best solution is to buy older gfx card like Radeon X800/850/1800/1900 and use os like win2000/XP .

[Victuz]

Well I'm not willing to pull out ram cards or buy an older GPU just to play the game right xD.

But I will try out the things you described. I'll repost/edit when they are checked.

EDIT: Nope none of it helped. Guess I'll go play Rome ;P. it's my second favourite.

[caravel]

Thanks for your feedback... yes it seems there's no solution for the slow loading times.

What graphics card do you have?

[Victuz]

Radeon HD4850 Toxic 512

So amount of vram is not the reason, or so I guess :p. Also I'm using windows XP.

[caravel]

You're confusing vram with system ram...

I believe some have reported that this issue goes away when upgrading to newer windows releases (i.e. Vista/7).

[Stazi]

You can try the oldest possible drivers. For HD4850 - catalyst 8.1.

[Gigantus]

Moved to technical forum

[Victuz]

yeah "vram" was in fact a brain typo ;P. I was tired while typing this in. Also the first thing I did before posting was using older version of drivers. Didn't help. I guess I'll check it out when I FINALLY move to win 7 .