yawn... why do some games take so darn long to install?

Dano

Dano

Dano

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Sat waiting for Gears of War to install, I'd forgotten just how long it took :(

7.41GB on the DVD translating to (still waiting) installed.

Reminds me of Beneath a Steel Sky on the amiga, think it was 11 floppies which took in excess of an hour to install when you could copy the entire contents of a full floppy to the system in around a minute IIRC, makes you wonder just what the hell some installer routines are doing...
 
Nothing can be longer and bigger than FSX.

13.7 GB

about 30 mins to install, (iirc)

and 1 hour to defragment the twenty thousand files afterwards. (you can download the defrag report HERE)
 
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WoW takes stupidly long if you include downloading patches.
But AoC......that took me 2+ hours just to install from disc :eek:
 
Jade Empire took ages, all the small voice files as there are so many different dialogues.
 
Dano said:
Reminds me of Beneath a Steel Sky on the amiga, think it was 11 floppies which took in excess of an hour to install when you could copy the entire contents of a full floppy to the system in around a minute IIRC, makes you wonder just what the hell some installer routines are doing...
Click to expand...

Would probably have been a lot of decompression needed; in the days of floppies space was at such a premium that a lot of files needed to be compressed. Nowadays we kinda take decompression for granted (with media speed being largely the limiting factor on modern cpus), but processors 20 years ago were a different matter.
 
GOW decompresses that 7GB into 10GB on the fly. Takes around 50mins even on a QX6850 + Samsung F1 1TB!!

Stranglehold & Blacksite are 2 recent games which take ages as well (think Stranglehold is 15GB & Blacksite 15GB both are on 2 DVD's!!).

Another thing which causes this is that many recent optical drives do not spin up as fast to reduce noise but obviously this increases install times in general but can help with compatibility issues.
 
just image the disc and mount and install it. Takes much less time.

or buy a faster dvd drive
 
Check out the ridiculous number of files for Grid...

Size: 10.1 GB (10,862,754,573 bytes)
22,354 Files, 1,373 Folders

If only Carmack's .PAK files could be made law :p
 
flibby said:
Yeah for some reason Gears of War always take an extraordinary amount of time to install.
Click to expand...

Yeh I found that.
Although patching BF2 up to date takes longer.

I miss installed UT99 from disc image from a harddrive onto a raid-0 array of 2 seagate 7200.11s :D Took 30 seconds to install!
 
HangTime said:
Would probably have been a lot of decompression needed; in the days of floppies space was at such a premium that a lot of files needed to be compressed. Nowadays we kinda take decompression for granted (with media speed being largely the limiting factor on modern cpus), but processors 20 years ago were a different matter.
Click to expand...

Again, if I recall correctly there was little decompression going on for Beneath a Steel Sky, it was purely down to the way it decided to copy the files.

As for GoW, yeh the decompression part takes a while too, but even so the main annoyance is the time it takes to actually get to that point when other games take far less time to copy a similar amount of data across so it's nowt to do with needing a faster drive but something specific about the GoW installer.
 
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