You misunderstood my post, I was asking about what stuff to disable.

Also I want to keep windows 98 (I don't trust Windows XP and I heard if you buy it, their copy protection system makes you put all this personal info in Microsoft's routinely hacked database. I prefer to) and win98 can't handle over 2 gigs of memory.

WinXP is a much more stable platform than Win98. Microsoft has dropped support for Win98 (so no more security patches) and many developers are not supporting Win98 for their new software releases. If you are in the market for a new PC you might want to what until Windows Vista is released.

Playing a game with a gigantic map (every abundant) created under v1.0 is painful with only 512MB because of the memory issues with that version. Improvements were made to this problem in v1.11 and v1.2 (target release date June 15, 2006). Anyone tried v1.2 with a gigantic map (every abundant) with only 512MB?

All you are required to do is activate it, and that process does not involve giving any personal information.

And besides that, 98 is no longer a supported OS at Microsoft, as far as I know. It will not have drivers for the new hardware. So if you do update your machine you will almost certainly have to upgrade the OS as well.

New weird software, huh? You mean Vista? That is the next OS that will replace XP, which should ship next year some time.
You can either upgrade the machine now or wait until it ships. But you really can't improve the performance of your current machine without putting up some money to upgrade the CPU and video card. The little tweaks to the OS itself may help very slightly, but it will hardly be noticable.

And by the way, 98 can not handle anything over your current 512MB. Any more in 98 is just a pure waste of money.

well, regardless of what OS you use, the only other things you can do is disable idle backround programs (which is much easier to do with XP), use minimal jewelry on your ships, and play smaller maps.

i rejected XP for the longest time. then i got over it. personally i woudln't recommend waiting for Vista though unless you were also planning to drop major cash with an upgrade or new PC. i don't see the point in worrying about Vista unless you're also planning to exceed 4GB or drop the cash on a 64-bit processor. for your immediate needs, an upgrade to XP to support more RAM would help, at least running larger games.

i'd guess your processor should still be able to handle this game, but your graphics card was low end when it came out several years ago. unfortuneately, if that's an AGP card you're pretty out of luck, unless you can find a better outdated AGP card on eBay, or also have a PCI-express slot. the other things to consider is if your motherboard will even be able to handle upgrades at this point.

but RAM, at least, is pretty cheap, so you might want to consider upgrading to XP and throwing in another 512. it would at least prolong the life of your machine a bit longer.

Go ahead and upgrade to XP, there's nothing "bad" about it, except that it's from Microsoft and you already have that problem

Just stay away from that Vista thing

Make sure your swap file (virtual memory) is huge, I always recommend a fixed swap file of 4GB (4096 min, 4096 max), prefferably on another hard drive, prefferably on a separate bus (cable) from your main hard drive.

Okay, what stuff can I disable that will help (besides anti-aliasing and lower resolution) it use less memory???

another 512 ram would really help, and a geforce 6 series card, works great for me in my system which had similar specs to yours, keeps it current for about another year or so and then you gotta seriously think about a new system for sure with HT, and probably a Dual Core rig. They should be about $750-900 in a year or so, and that'll make your system real happy.

If you have 1.5 ghz processor that means you got like just over a P 3 in terms of processing power, one of the earliest Pentium 4's, ram would probably be the PC 2100, and this should be almost dirt cheap, maybe sand cheap So get get somemore before it starts going up in price cause they stop making it.

Also what are the best things to disable in the performance options for speeding up performance?

Okay, to actually answer your question, I found the best way to speed up the game for me was to actually turn off the "Ships" for the mini-map. The game doesn't have to display it, thus a little faster speed. I also turn off battle sequences, Enemy battle sequences, and the background nebula and stars. When I was playing with all this enabled, the game would bog down on any map larger than small once the galaxy was completely colonized. On a gigantic map, it took my computer almost 5 minutes to reset after hitting the turn button. Now, it's little more than 3 seconds and I was playing gigantic map again.

In the interface window of the options there are slider bars on the left side of the screen. Turning those down will help immensely. Also, beneath the slider bars is an option to turn off nebula and background stars. De-selecting this will help as well.

On the mini-map, just de-select the option for ships just before you end your current turn. It will allow the turn to process without having to show each individual movement on the screen, thus bogging down. When your turn starts up, just re-enable the ships option to see where each one went. You can still keep track of them without having to burn processing in watching each one move (I don't mean on the main map either. Just the effort to show the moves on the mini-map can burn through processing quickly).

Turning off textures might help during the save/load sequence but I found it has little impact on the game play itself, except that it confuses me if I zoom in on the main map.

If battle sequences work well, that's great. But turning off enemy battle sequences will eliminate the computer forcing you to watch enemy action near your territory (but not in it or against you). It's not much but it helps.

Oh, increase your virtual memory, if you haven't already.