Wishbone, it must be the drive. I'm playing on the same chip as you (E6750), although I've OCed it to 3.4 GHz. I doubt that affects load times though. 4GB RAM here as well, but I have the game installed on a separate hard drive (my F drive, which is games only). Win XP Home 32 bit SP 3.

Well, one thing I can say for sure is that Vista Ultimate 64bit bogs down a system significantly more than XP Home 32bit. But I'm guessing that the drive is indeed the problem. Should try to defrag it one of these days. I'm just a bit worried about how long that will take :-/

I didnt like it as much as the first one. I didnt mind the mako in the first one i thought it was pretty cool to go exploring around the planets and stuff but scanning was really boring. I didnt like how they got rid of most of the skills and weapons/upgrades. And the final boss was probably the stupidest i have ever played against. Not only was it a crap idea for a final boss i defeated it without it even attacking me. luckily someone spoiled it for me by telling me what the final boss was so i wasn't to disappointed.It was still pretty good but i didnt like how the things they changed turned out.

There's also the windows page file issue, definitely keep that on a seperate drive to the game if you can
Defragging on vista isn't as bad as it seems. From my experience its roughly the same as on XP. Hmm that reminds me, I've not tried it on 7 yet, must see if its any different

I am finally done with Mass Effect 2.
It is an awesome game and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good science fiction movie.
Unfortunately, there is a tendency to crash every now and then in game.

no crashes here.

Mine crashes once or twice but I get stuck in boxes and crates very often and sometimes I can't even access the menu.

that never happens.
one time in Mass Effect 1 I got stuck on a ledge that existed between 4 walls and couldn't move, but this is Mass Effect 2, that didn't happen to me.

I'm on windows 7 and mine runs fine. The only problem i have is that the start menu stays frozen for a minute before you can select something.

That happens to a lot of people. It's been reported time and time again on the tech support forums. I've had it happen to me a couple of times in my run through ME2 as well.
That seems to be a lag while it connects to the Cerberus Network. At least, that appears to be why it happens on my game.

Hey. I have question about requirements.
anyone tried to play the game with single core cpu? how did it turn out?
I have amd 3200, 2gb of ddr1 ram and ati 4850.
Batman AA gave me little troubles (when loading altough not sure if that was cpu fault) and Empire works flawelessly on mid to high graphic settings.
so how would ME2 run?
I finished ME1 just three days ago as goodie good Adrian Shepard. and I want to continue into ME2.
oh. ain't he cute :D

Single cores are not officially supported, and many people were having problems with them. However, BioWare released a patch that's supposed to address some of the single core issues. I don't know if it's 100% or not, but many people reported the patch really helped.

really?? eh. i won't upgrade my computer till march next year (when i finish school. fees are killing me now)
so i guess i should wait :(

You can get a decent dual core for like 30 bucks though haha