Texture packs slowing down my PC

[cerebus5]

Does anyone else have this problem? By now I've accumulated around 4gb of N64 hi-res packs from all around. Last night I tried moving them from one hard drive to another and it took so long I just gave up. Indexing my PC has become a nightmare, virus scans take twice as long - generally everything has become much more arduous because of the fact that there are now tens of thousands of individual textures packed in disparate folders strewn across my hard drive. Also I think the fact that the folder tree to get to the packs is so deep (c:/users/my documents/emulation/1964/plugins/hi-res/the legend of zelda/Celda/hyrule field for example :D) gives windows explorer a hernia every time it tries to access it.

Suggestions welcome :)

[death--droid]

Have you tried defragmenting your computer?

[cerebus5]

Sure, yes.

[death--droid]

How much room do you have left and what is your system specs.

[cerebus5]

I have plenty of hard drive space - it's a 500gb - and 4gb ram with a 3ghz c2d processor. It's just because the texture files aren't collated together very well. I've done what I can but it's just the nature of the packs. You end up with dozens of individual folders with many hundreds of small textures in each one. it's a nightmare for the archiver which has to copy over every single file instead of collectively.

[Kazangwa]

Have you tried defragmenting your computer?

Defragmenting is a useless utility...

Cerebus, what interface does your hard drive use? Is it SATA or IDE? And how new is it?

[death--droid]

Helps for me, Generally speeds my computer up greatly :P(I'm not using the windows one either)

Anyway i have no idea what the problem could be.

[Kazangwa]

Helps for me, Generally speeds my computer up greatly :P(I'm not using the windows one either)

Anyway i have no idea what the problem could be.

Ah, well I did mean the Windows Defragmenter. I used it one time and ended up with less space than before.

But back to what I was saying, you could have a fast computer, and a good amount of ram, but if your hard drive interface is old, like IDE, copying files will take a long time regardless.

[cerebus5]

It's not a problem with the computer, I promise. It's a brand new seagate sata drive. It's simply that whereas with most games the textures are collated together so the copier does them all in one go, with hi-res packs the file explorer has to synchronise across them all simultaneously - copying takes exorbitant amounts of time. It would be the same with any similar file setup - more individual files means more copy/scan time. I'm just wondering if there's a way of getting past that. For the most part it doesn't affect the PC, it's only when it comes to copying between hard drives or virus scans or something like that.

[Kazangwa]

It's not a problem with the computer, I promise. It's a brand new seagate sata drive. It's simply that whereas with most games the textures are collated together so the copier does them all in one go, with hi-res packs the file explorer has to synchronise across them all simultaneously - copying takes exorbitant amounts of time. It would be the same with any similar file setup - more individual files means more copy/scan time. I'm just wondering if there's a way of getting past that. For the most part it doesn't affect the PC, it's only when it comes to copying between hard drives or virus scans or something like that.

Yeah, not sure what to tell you, unless perhaps you bought an outdated SATA interface, but I doubt you did.

Maybe a good idea when trying to move them would be to archive them all into a single WinRAR archive, but I doubt that would save any time really.

[cerebus5]

Ach it's more of an irritation than anything else. My PC is fine for most purposes, it's just when it comes to the texture packs. Things like setting picasa to do a picture scan of my pc - now it has to trawl through thousands of miniscule .gif files lol.