Sudden long loading times and random crashes

Hi guys

Ive been running darthmod fine for the past 6 months or so with the occassional crash during long battles but recently its been playing up a bit. all of a sudden it takes about 6 minutes to load the game (it took about 1 minute before) and all battles are suddenly taking ages to load too... a lot of my battles are now starting to crash an hour in or so... any help would be appreciated

DxDiag.txtDxDiag.txt

Degrag your harddrive lately?

yeah ive now defragged it twice this week overnight and it still seems to be happening... shall i try a defrag in safe mode or does that only make a minor difference? it's weird that this has only started happening recently, it was running fine for ages with hardly any loading times, and my battles were running fine with no crashes - even the ones that had more than 50,000 troops on the battlefield (seriously epic fun)!

How much garbage do you having running in the background and possibly windowed mode that have absolutely nothing to do with playing the game?

not much in all honesty, usually a few programs like Magic ISO and Virtual clone drive that start up when my pc loads. but they only use about 10k of memory though in comparison to Napoleon's 1 million!

the problems seemed to coincide with the installation of some other steam games - could that present an issue?

IF steam is on one of its update search moves, yes.

One reason I despise cloud computing.

Autoupdaters and antivirus autoscans are also notorious for such things. I have all mine set on "Notify" for this reason. Also, one good reason I quit using Symantec and Zone Alarm when they got to the point I could no longer do this.

well i think i can remember steam updating around that time too - looks like that's the cause of it... any workarounds or solutions? how can a simple update screw me over so royally?

thanks for your time mate

Unless you love multiplayer, play in offline mode.

Well it looks like my past defrags didnt work because i defragged my pc again last night and it ran beautifully, with hardly any loading times. I slaughtered 20,000 frenchmen to celebrate. Sorry for wasting your time Irishron, thanks anyway for your help!

on a side note, is there a good screenshot tool/ video clip tool i can use to capture some of my exploits? would be nice to upload some pictures of the chaos ive been causing.

Many use FRAPS.

Thanks a lot - also, what do you think of my set up and how could i optimise it? 3 x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 set up with SLI, or would you recommend a more modern GPU?

Ivybridge i5 you can overclock to about 4GHz stable or wait for the Haswell line up to be released. The old Phenom is your bottleneck right now.

ok cool so i've got sufficient GPU power, i just need a better processor... might wait for the Haswell, just reading up on it now, sounds amazing!