[pierreh]

That's terrible. You try cleaning up unused/unwanted startup programs? Those little things running in the background add up.

Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't checked that. There are surely a good number of them. Actually, when I run the Task Manager and look at all the stuff that is running I am puzzled; surely a lot of that serves no useful purpose whatsoever, it is there possibly 'just in case', or because Mickeysoft decreed that it should be running, or whatever.

But: if those are launched by Windows at start-up time, they are always there, regardless of what I run afterwards, then they cannot be, by themselves, the cause of the game's slow running? That slow running really depends on how much other stuff I purposedly run. Like right now, I run Skype (lauched at startup), Firefox (used among other things to post this), Acrobat Reader, Libre Office, and WhatApp. Surely if I start the game now on top of those it will be slow. Which of those programs and tools is the cause of the slow running, I really wonder. Anyway, restarting the computer prior to running the game is a minor inconvenience, I can live with it. It's just that I don't like unexplained facts if I can help it.