ok so I’m back in the game after a 2-3 year break and I occasionally multi box with my other account. only every time I alt tab there seems to be a very long delay between screen switches and some times it can take over a minute for this task to be complete.
what I have noticed is that my PC seems to be making a lot of noise like it’s thinking about it’s designated task task.
I do have a reasonably new graphics card so I sure that is not the issue but it does stick some times when I jump through gates and can take longer than 20 seconds for it to resume to normal play.
I have now lost two ships because of this albeit destroyers so I would appreciate some advice or suggestions before an expensive trip to the computer shop. I’m wondering if it might be time to upgrade the cpu and motherboard?
How much main memory do you have ? This sounds like ‘thrashing’, where a lot of virtual memory swaps are happening. I’ve noticed that, even in the 18 months I’ve been playing Eve, the memory requirements have increased considerably - I used to be able to multi-box three accounts with ease on this PC, but now just two accounts is all I can run without ‘thrashing’.
Don’t assume you need to upgrade to a more ‘modern’ PC and graphics card, my Linux box is 12 years old with a 6-year-old mid-range graphics card but, as long as I don’t push it into ‘swapping’ it gives me a really good performance. Try maximising your main memory first - much cheaper…
You should be able to multibox 2 accounts with the 32 bit client - which only uses 4Gb RAM. You may want to back off your graphic settings to medium to see if that helps. With 8Gb RAM or more you should be able to use the 64 bit client.
If you plan to keep your current system for a while an SSD is a worthwhile replacement for a mechanical hard drive. If you’re thinking of replacing the machine wait and make sure the new one has M.2 NVME storage.
the delay might be because of full screen, change full screen to windowed on both accounts (and keep its size to cover whole screen if you like to), that should make swapping between accounts seemless
Phenom II was produced between 2008 and 2012 so the machine is at least 7 years old. I don’t recommend upgrades - simply use the machine as is until you are ready to replace it.
Running your clients in windowed mode is a good idea - that way you don’t need to ALT Tab. Simply select the client you want in the task bar.