I was reading on another forum about enhancing performance. Someone there suggested editing the Windows XP 32bit to add a 3gb switch for those with more than 3GB of RAM (I have 4gb).

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=390476; look under "For XP Users".

Anyone tried this to increase Oblivon performance?

~ Dani ~

I wouldn't recommend it with XP, you'll probably run into memory address conflicts with your computer's drivers. I tried it awhile back and I was having lots of video card lockups, and sometimes my sound would stop working as well. I even ended up with the blue screen of death a few times while trying to run Fallout because of a video driver failure. The OS was not designed for that extra RAM usage, it's just going to be more trouble than it's worth.

Crap. I suspected as much, which is why I didn't just launch into it.

Sigh. What's the use of 4 gb of RAM and an i7 QuadCore if there's no way for your OS or, more importanty, Oblivion, to take advantage of them?

~ Dani ~

You should also read http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1118450-oblivion-and-memory-usage/. It contains a lot of enlightening points about how Oblivion uses memory and what its limits are.

The bad news, it proves that adding the 4GB LAA patch to Oblivion while on a 32 bit OS is completely worthless, as Oblivion won't even use the extra memory anyway. The only way to benefit from the 4GB LAA patch is to be using a 64 bit OS.

Well Oblivion isn't the only game out there. I'm sure if you really want to max out your system you can find something that will do the job. Civ 5 recommends the use of a quad core. Though with the XP version you have, you're not going to find anything that will use up all your RAM. 2 gig is the most any program can use without that switch enabled. If you're really that concerned about it, why not just upgrade to Window 7 64bit?

^ This

You'll never look back. It's dreamy...

I would upgrade to Windows 7 but I don't have a license and can't afford one right now. And sure, Oblivion isn't the only game out there, but it is one of the three or four I play. I don't play a lot of games and I was hoping my new MacBook with an i7 would run Oblivion, well, if not flawlessly, but better than before and maybe quite a bit.

But as it is, with almost the same identical load order as on my old MacBook, I'm getting very, very close to the same performance.

~ Dani ~