So I'm playing Morrowind in my legacy laptop at about 10-15 FPS (less with enemies), full of mods (but now I cannot go back to an tree-less MW :hubbahubba: ). I've tried everything to get some extra FPS to no avail.

The other day, though, got an error message which I never saw before: cannot-remember-video-name.bik not found. I just clicked Yes to all, and the game loaded normally. To my astonishment, the game now was running at a steady, smooth, 30 FPS!!!! Interior, exterior, enemies, whatever, the game was as smooth as one could wish.

I've tried to reproduce the error again without success. I've tried the no-video mod, different things, but nothing works. The only thing left is to try a no-cd patch (because I think the cd-drive might be not working properly and that's why I received that error) but would like to avoid it if possible.

Any ideas?

Well, I can tell you that I modified my morrowind.ini file to load a non-existant .bik file for most entries, as follows:

[Movies]
Company Logo=whateever.bik
Morrowind Logo=whateever.bik
New Game=mw_intro.bik
Loading=whateever.bik
Options Menu=whateever.bik

Note that I have no 'whateever.bik' anywhere on my computer, it does not exist. I imagine you can enter any name you want and it will work the same way....

and, like you on starting up the game I get some error boxes telling me they were not found... I just press ESC to ignore all and the game loads right up. The reason I did this is I noticed that the computer will only access the CD drive one time (ever) if it has been in sleep mode or restarted. To be a little clearer, lets say I just rebooted my system, and I launch Morrowind. The computer will spin up the CD and give the error windows. Now, after that, as long as I don't restart my system or enter sleep mode the computer will *never spin up the CD again* - it will just launch the game. This has obvious benefits.

So, to conclude, it seems if you simply modify your morrowind.ini file as above you can get close to a no-CD MW game. Enjoy.

Thanks a lot, I'll try it this evening

Apart from the videos and a startup check Morrowind doesn't access the CD (I don't think). You should just be able to remove the disk after startup if you want (You just end up with video errors)

Thanks for your help guys, I've been able to reproduce the missing video error but looks like this wasn't the only "error" which gave me 30 FPS. I'm stuck with my 10 FPS :brokencomputer:

Thanks anyway :foodndrink:

Sorry to hear it didnt help your fps. About the CD access, for me, without the modified ini file, my xp box as well as my win 7 box access the CD every time I relaunch the game. Now, if the CD drive is already spinning, you wouldn't notice, but let's say you are modding and frequently launching and exiting the game to test things. Well I got tired of waiting for the CD drive to spin up every time, not to mention reducing wear on the drive and CD. If I was out of the game in the CS or in nifskope to edit animations for more than 10 minutes, the CD would spin up when I relaunched the game.