Just a warning, if you screw something up, it is not the fault of JustGreg or HGS.
So, without further ado, Ladies and Gentelmen, boys and girls, children of all ages, I give you...
As we all know, the Zone tends to lag. This is something that is pretty much a charicteristic of Web based multiplayer systems. I just felt like helping the lower end agers catch up with us, and even help the people with Pentium 3's or K6-3's saying "What the hell? Why's it laggin?". Of course those Zone servers and the interface doesn't really help either... 1... Sometimes the amount of things you have running while playing RoR can be holding you back... eating back valuble system resources. If you have an older system this can be a problem. I only have Some of the progs I had running Default were... Some of these things have to go. Anything MS Office related- "Nope". Any third party prog, "Sorry". Anything unecessary goes. Not during games, anyway. There are a couple of ways to edit the progs on startup. In Win95 it requires some Registry hacks. Then delete the keys that you don't want (the progs) In Windows 98, go to Run-> msconfig - Its a simplified version. Just click what you want or don't want and hit apply. Ok now, moving on... 2... The Zone and your browser are your enimies when it comes to lag. The whole time you are playing you have not one not two not three but 3... ISP's? No matter how powerful your modem is, you aint goin no where if your ISP only supports 28.8 connections. AOL is not a good Gaming ISP, or even an ISP in the first place, but things like Earthlink and Mindspring are fine. But if you can get a local ISP that has decent speeds (V.90 56k is what you want for modem... better trade in that crappy 36.6 Winmodem). A good utility for dial up networking is TweakDUN (for the 95 users that don't want to edit their registry). You can get it at Also, if you have Cable, DSL, or Sattelite connections availible in your area, get it! Don't even have second thoughts! Some good services are 4... Hardware is still crucial. I know the sys reqs say P90, 16 megs RAM. But it will still hurt you in the long run if you have a crappy system. The best first step is a RAM upgrade... If you have 16 go to 96 or more with a 64 meg simm (not dimm...make sure its the same speed and has the same amt of pins and bus speed...) The next thing is the processor. If you have an old Pentium or Pentium pro resting in a Socket 7 or super Socket 7 mobo, a K6-2 or K6-3 is in your future. But, some people might have trouble doing that. Thankfully, there is a special upgrade package by But if your budget is lower than a coupla hundred bucks... be stingy, we'll all be laughin at you 5... Have you defragged your hard drive lately? Maybe you should. It'll free up space and prevent the HD from reading data all over the place. Every coupla weeks is ussually a good idea. Well, thats it. Hope it helps you enjoy your AOE/ROR experiences. If you have any other questions concerning other games or tech Q's, ------------------
Go to Run, type in "regedit"and follow this path...
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run