[pierreh]

A completely different topic today: extremely slow running of the game in some cases, which I'll detail here.

My computer (an Asus Ultrabook laptop with a very decent performance, Intel's Core i7 chip, etc) runs under WIndows 10 since the memory card crash of this spring. The SimCity 4 game itself runs under Steam, since I don't have a CD drive, whether internal or external.

If I start the game after having done other things with the laptop, like e-mail, googling, reading texts on the net, etc, the game runs extremely slowly. For example, when starting a city I usually get some messages in boxes, say about some avenue being clogged by traffic, or simply about the mayor doing a good job of running his city: switching from a box to the next can last several seconds. Any action, like moving the visible part of the city, or changing the scale, takes also several seconds, up to say 20 to 25 seconds.

In short, the game is not usable. My only recourse is: exiting the game (which itself can last up to a minute), closing other stuff runniing (typically Firefox, Skype, possibly WhatsApp, etc), and restarting the computer. With a minimal amount of other things running, the game then runs normally.

This is a rather new behavior. It is as if, when 'too many' other things are running on the computer, or have run on it, the game is slowed down enormously. After a restart, things are 'fresh' and the game runs again at normal speed. Memory contention? I looked at what the Task Manager shows when the game runs slowly: there is abnormally high CPU utilisation by the game's exe, as if the game was 'thrashing'.

Has anyone encountered a similar behavior of the game?

EDIT: Since this is now happening regularly, when starting, as soon as the game shows the current region, I try to 'move' it a bit. If the reaction is not immediate, I know that the game is running slowly, and I exit immediately, restart etc. This doesn't cure the problem but it saves me some waiting time.