We've all seen the guides which tell you how to arrange your training schedules or how to make the perfect tactic, but there aren't many guides out there which help the people who can't open FM in the first place.

This guide is for those people who don't have a high end computer but still want FM to run at a respectible speed. It's about 50% on speeding up FM and 50% on speeding up your PC as well.

Ths guide is planned to be first in a series of 'practical' guides aimed to help people avoid crashes and corrupt saves, among other things

With that said, enjoy!

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How to speed up FM
The first couple of seasons on FM are always great, where everything runs along smoothly and quickly. However, the slow decay of time will eventually start to take its grip. You won't notice it at first, but those international fixtures will each take an extra second to process and loading your game will take an extra minute. No serious problem there. However, it's just the beginning, and the deeper you immerse yourself into the world of FM and the further you go, you'll notice what is the unmistakable slowdown of your save game.

Exaggeration aside, anyone who's played a long term game or anyone that has less than a NASA-grade PC will notice that their save game will take longer to save/load/process. Sometimes it'll be so slow that you just decide to start again. It's not so bad if you're playing a short term game, but what if you're into your 20th season and want to carry on? You'll have to speed your computer up.

The easiest way to do this is to go and buy a new quad core processor and 4GB of RAM and enjoy your game. Not everyone wants to spend money though; some people prefer to squeeze some extra performance out of their current PC. So there are two main parts to this, speeding up your computer, and speeding up FM. Here's a short guide explaining how to do both.

Speeding up FM
Open FM and load your save game
Open Windows Task Manager (Control, Alt, Delete) and select the 'Processes' tab
Highlight 'fm.exe' and right click on it
Set priority to 'High' (this may make other programs you're running slightly slower)
When FM is open, go on to the details screen and change the detail to all competitions to ‘none'

It's all very quick and simple and will allow FM to run that bit quicker. With any luck, that'll be all you need to do. However, not everyone will be so lucky, so you may need to delve deeper and speed up the PC itself

Speeding up your PC
Set up a system restore point – This ensures that, if you make a massive mistake, you can easily reset your computer to the way it was. I sincerely suggest you do this, as it provides you with a safety net, even though you shouldn't need one. To do this, press Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > System Restore

Optimise Display Settings – Windows operating systems have many tricks which make the interface look good. However, they use up a lot of system resources. Open the Control Panel, click System, and then click the Advanced tab. In the performance area, click settings and you'll be shown a list of options with tick boxes next to them. Untick all the options you feel you don't need, or do away with them all and select ‘Adjust for best performance'

Stop programs opening on startup – When you first turn your computer on, it'll automatically open some programs in the background, which use system resources. This is a good thing for the likes of anti virus software, but not so good if media players etc are opening. Open the folder in C:Windows/Tasks. A list of programs which operate at a specific time are here. Delete what you don't need.

If you're computer savvy, you can open Run and type ‘msconfig' and press enter. Under the Startup tab there is a list of all the programs that start when Windows loads up. Scroll through them and untick what you don't need. Do this at your own risk however, as you could run into problems if you stop the wrong program from working. If you correctly sort out the start up programs, not only will Windows load faster when you boot up your PC, but less programs will run in the back ground, making your PC faster.

Uninstall and Defrag – By going into Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs, you uninstall programs you don't use and then defrag your hard drive. Not only will it free up hard drive space, but your computer will be able to find files quicker, meaning saving and loading will be faster.

Conclusion
After doing all the above, your FM game and computer should both run faster. Everything in this guide has been thoroughly tested, so there should be no ill affects. I've done everything in the guide to get my PC and FM to run faster, and the difference was huge and there have been no problems.

Even if you inadvertently do something wrong, you can just use system restore to reset your system to how it was before you started.

Obviously, spending money on a brand new computer or new RAM etc will speed everything up more, but as I said, not everyone wants to spend money. If you're one of those people, hopefully your FM will run at a fast enough speed for you to continue enjoying your save game. Football Manager has always been a game that can run extremely slow and be incredibly frustrating to play because of it. We have written a small guide on how to improve performance and speed the game up quite a bit. You will lose a bit of detail and possibly it won't look as great visually but it will run faster.

Index

Database
Graphics
Sounds
Detail level

Database

First things first the game database is the biggest reason your game could be going to slow. If you have select 20 leagues on a slow PC then it will go stupidly slow so this is really common sense.

If you have played FM for a few versions at least you will understand how changing how many leagues you select will seriously affect your gameplay experience.

First look at your PC and two specific areas, CPU speed and RAM.

An example PC would be my own.

Dual core 2ghz
3gb PC6300 RAM

When I first brought the PC I thought, I could run FM2008 with all leagues! Hell was I wrong.

What I have learned is I can run the following at a nice speed without any issues:

English leagues - Playable down to conference
Italian leagues - Playable
Spanish leagues - Playable
German leagues - Playable
Frence leagues - Playable
Dutch leagues - Playable

Then I will select maybe another two and then another two non-playable leagues.

That isn't anywhere near all leagues so you can see even with a half decent PC you can't run too many.

Tweak one: Don't run all the leagues from each selected country, for instance if you aren't going to play conference teams in the English league why select them?

Tweak two: Non-playable leagues use much smaller resources so if you just want to view these leagues without managing in them select them as non-playable.

Tweak three: If you have an intel processor see if you can enable hyperthreading, this will improve performance.

Tweak four: Lets try a formula to get a good running game. For every 512mb of RAM run one league.

So for my 3gb I can run 6 which is about right.

Graphics

Skins, backrounds, facepacks, logos and kits all make the game look better but do they slow down performance?

I don't have proof they slow it down but I suspect they would although your graphics card would do most of the work.

If you can keep the graphics to a min and it might be best to use the default skin.

Tweak one: Make sure if you are using the default skin and no graphics that skin cache is enabled.

Tweak two: Try not to use a mega pack with hundreds or thousands of facepacks because this surely will have an impact on performance.

Sounds

I never use sounds in FM, because im either listening to music while playing or being nagged by the wife who is constantly asking why am I playing that stupid game still.

There is one setting to save a few resources and thats sound cache, disable it and disable sounds.

Detail level

Once a game is loaded in your options menu will be one item called Detail level.

Detail level is something you can tweak to increase the speed of processing games. I've put a screenshot below to show you what it looks like, play around with the settings until you find a good mix of detail and speed.

Detail level in Football Manager 2008

Tweak one: Select none for all competitions will mean you cannot view a lot of stats from games however this will massively increase the game speed.

Tweak two: Select non for all competitions apart from the league you're playing in.