Windows 7affecting Il-2 performance
 

For several years now, whenever I'm not at my desktop, I've been playing Il-2 on my laptop, running Windows XP. My computer has a 1.7 ghz processor, 1.2 gb of RAM, and a 32gb graphics card. It could generally run Il-2 on almost full graphics, except for landscape, which was excellent instead of perfect. Recently I installed Windows 7, and now while I haven't had problems starting the game like other people have, the game runs horrendously slowly, even just in the menus, like at 1 fps. This is running on OpenGL, and the game doesn't even run when using Direct X. I was wondering if there is any remedy for this problem, or if my computer simply can't do it with these specifications.

You need a minimum of 3 gigs of ram for Win 7 to reach decent operating speeds. I would advise 4 gigs minimum. The W7 OS uses 2+ gigs by itself. Most laptops now have 3 gigs of ram or better, and that's because of Vista/Win7 overhead requirements.

Go into the task manager (ctrl+alt+del) and look at the memory usage.

When I only had 2 gigs, win7 took about ~500mb.
Since the upgrade to DDR3/4gb it takes 1.1Gb.

I'm typing this on Vista 64 bit OS system .. Task manager shows 1.75 gig is being used when I'm just lookning at task mgr screen or doing nothing. I am sure you can search the web and find some performance options.

I installed Windows 7 (UAC pop up messages did my head in even though I was logged on as Admin) so added a partition to the HD then installed XP onto it. At boot up I select XP for my flightsims and Windows 7 for all the boring day to day things...like work! Plus, the rest of the family only use Win 7 and my XP install is isolated from teenage tampering, download crap, etc.

Min requirements for Win7 are:

x86 (32 bit version) - 1 GB or RAM
x64 - 2 GB of RAM


So it says on the official website.

sounds like 32bit

Thanks for the info, but it turns out my only problem was that I didn't have a driver for my specific graphics card. I downloaded the driver, and now it works quite well, thank goodness. I guess I must have a 32 bit version of Windows 7, because Il-2 has been running quite smoothly with my 1.2 gb of RAM. Again, thanks for the info.

The 1 fps should have been the clue to it being a driver problem :) Drivers are usually the biggest issue rather than the OS itself.

Glad to hear it's working and that you sorted it out :)