Strange happenings

[davedingler]

For the past several days, when trying to lay additional track and add in scenery objects to my SETexas route, I get the dreaded SBHH sign when I want to go back in and make changes or additions to the route.

This happens every time that I close down the program, exit Steam, and shut down for the night. I save my work progress often, I back up what I have done after every session and still get the error.

I have a separate RW Railworks folder for my route and another for the standard routes. I have two routes folders in the route development Railworks folder, one set of routes are the standard routes and the development folder contains only the development route (SETexas). I switch names when verifying the file contents from steam, so as not to dl route files when I verify the cache. Seems every time I do the cache verification, Steam says that 2 or 3 files need to be downloaded.

I am awaiting a new hard drive to be delivered. My current drive where RW is located is nearly completely full. The folder that contains all RW related files is nearly 500GB, which I will be examining to see what can be done away with.

Any one else have this type of problem? If so, how did you cure it?

Thanks for listening,

Dave

[buzz456]

Someone a whole lot more technical than I am can jump in here but depending on your OS and how much RAM you have windows could be using quite a bit of hard drive in a page file to operate properly. If your hard drive is near full that's probably the issue. Chris can probably give you a good rule of thumb but other than storage HD I try to keep mine under 60% full if I can.

[davedingler]

Thanks Buzz, I've ordered a new 1T drive from Tiger and as soon as It gets here I'll be installing it and moving all my RW files on to it. It will be dedicated to only RW. Hopefully that will cure my problem.

RE: Memosry- I have 6GB and video card has 1gb.

Dave

[buzz456]

If I understand all this more or less incomprehensible goobily gokk, if you are running a 64 bit system 6 megs of ram should keep windows from spilling over to your hard drive however if you are on a 32 bit only 3.something megs are useable and windows might be using your hard drive. In any event when any regular hard drive gets mostly full the computer has a tough time finding all it bits and pieces and that's when reading errors start popping up. That new HD should take care of your problems.

I trust you are defragging regularly. That always helps performance.

[PapaXpress]

What Buzz is describing is 'caching'. A rule of thumb is never allow the free space on your hard disk to drop below 1/3 of your total disk space (even for a 1TB drive). If you do then OS starts to become sluggish as it needs to swap physical (RAM) and virtual memory (DISK) more often.

The other part of this (the good part) is with 64 bit OS's you can have add more than 4gb of ram so that the OS has more headroom for its resources and running applications. Where you can run into trouble is that RW is a 32 bit application, so it is possible to fill up its 4gb address space (which is comprised of both physical RAM and virtual memory).

[Chacal]

If I may add to this discussion, it is good to put your OS and page files on its own disk and have a separate disk for data, games, etc.

Data grows rapidly with time, the OS does not.
The OS needs a fast drive, data does (usually) not.
Data needs frequent backups, OS does not.

I have Windows 7 on its own 80GB disk and there's plenty of room for the cache files.
If my games and data grow too much, I just add more HDs.

[davedingler]

Thanks All, The new disk has been shipped and should arrive tomorrow or Thursday. Hopefully, by weekend I will have it installed and all RW files moved on to it.

Thanks again for your information and support.

Dave

[davedingler]

Well, the new disk arrived Thursday and was immediately installed. The remainder of Thur., all day Fri moving all files including numerous back-ups to the new drive from the "C & E" drives to the new "D" drive. --789GB of files. I suspect that 2/3 of those files will be put in the out basket before the day is done. Its amazing how much crap you can collect mostly BU of RW Sim file, routes and assets.--many duplicates.


Dave