Vista BF2 Issues

I'm thinking the fact that I only have 1GB of memory right now may be contributing to the problem, but since it'll be a few days before my 2GB arrives, I thought I'd see if anyone knew of another cause of this problem.

BF2 worked fine on XP, and appears to run fine on my friend's PC with Vista, but on mine, it takes (or, it seems like) 5 minutes to "verify client data".

When I finally do get in the game, it will run smoothly for a second, then kind of jump, like momentary lag. It will continue to do this repeatedly.

My hard drive light was blinking the whole time, so I'm guessing that the hard drive access is causing the jumping, but I don't know what would be causing all that hard drive access, unless it's using virtual memory. I would think, even with Vista, that 1GB would be enough to play decently.

I just had a thought though, i'll try playing with the lowest settings (or very low) and see if I get the same results. That shouldn't explain the long load times though...

Anyways, I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas.

Could be a number of things. What sort of hardware do you have?
Have you got a good graphics card ( I suspect that may be causing some of your problems)
!gb of ram is not a huge amount these days. Vista requires a minimum of 512mb, before you can even install it, so this may be another issue, but if you are getting more ram you should sort that bit out.
Just noticed your machine specs at the bottom of the post. You are stating that you have 2gb ram, is this what it will be after the upgrade?
How many mb does your grapics card have?

Oh yea sorry, I had 2GB, but one was disfunctional, so I'm getting a replacement.

My card is a 7950GT with 512MB. As I said, it ran fine in XP with the same card (and besides lack of memory, my other hardware is much better than before), so I think it's either just lack of RAM or Vista. If it is Vista, it must be a configuration issue because my friends works just fine. I'll run it with low settings and see if I still get the problem.

EDIT: I tried it on the lowest settings, and it ran smoothly. I guess I just can't crank it up 'till I get that new RAM.

Also, loading times seemed faster. Maybe I didn't have enough memory to load the high-resolution textures quickly?

Gaming in Vista, with just 1 gig of RAM is almost certain going to get you lag. From 2 gig and up you should have smooth gaming. Vista is clearly more of a resource hog than xp.

Download a RAM mananger like Memory Zipper plus, and you can see how much RAM, Vista + programs use up at normal desktop work.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/M...per-Plus.shtml

Wait, if I'm only using 70% of my RAM, why is it using half of my virtual memory?

Thats Windows for you. It won't normally use all of your physical RAM before starting to eat into virtual memory. If it did, the system would slow down even further.
As Goranpaa says, Vista is more of a resource hog than XP & XP is bad enough.
I would prefer to have a minimum of 1gb ram on all the XP machines that I am in charge of, but that aint gonna happen. If you want to game with Vista then 2gb would be a bare minimum. If you can go higher I would.