I’ve been a big fan of the Battlefield series since BF1942, and one thing I was disappointed about when I switched to the mac was the lack of games. So when Battlefield 2142 came out for the Mac I got it, but I was expecting my MacBook Pro to play Battlefield 2142 a little better than it did. BF2142 would lag so bad it was not playable, primarily when lots of stuff was going on, or when I needed to shoot at something. I started looking for a fix (and the cause) and just today came across (while browsing through BF2142’s files) that BF2142 keeps a cache of effects stored in your home folder under (Your Short Name)/Library/Preferences/Battlefield 2142 Preferences/p_drive/My Documents. I then put two and two together and figured FileVault (OS X’s home folder encryption) was causing the game to lag. So I turned off FileVault and launched the game once that was finished, it runs a lot smoother now with FileVault off. Sense Battlefield 2142 for the Mac isn’t native (its actually emulating the Windows .EXE’s) I wasn’t expecting performance to be that good, but how it played with FileVault enabled was unacceptable.

So if your installation of Battlefield 2142 is lagging try this:

1. If you’ve got FileVault enabled, disable it.
2. BF2142 uses around 1Gb of RAM, make sure you’ve got that much or more.
3. I suspect the speed of the hard drive has a lot to do with this, get the fastest drive possible, like a 7200RPM drive (my MacBook Pro came with a 5400RPM drive).

I’ve been working on a few reviews for OS X 411 and have one almost finished (they take longer than I expected). I’ll be putting the text up shortly and I’m working on getting a video going too. The video of the programs seems to be taking me the longest to complete, and I may have to do without it. In these reviews I’m creating sections titled Background Information (which will have information like how much it costs, what it takes to run it, etc), What does it Do (is the main part of the review, its got a summary of what the application does and how to do it) and a final section titled My Thoughts (which covers the actual rating, my opinion on whether its worth buying/downloading and what I feel it could be used for). Another section I’ve prepared is the Video section, but that may not be in all reviews.