Greetings,

New Player, here.

I've installed STO on this computer (Win7-64bit) with no problems and have been playing the game. I like it. So, I decided to install it on my wife's XP machine and immediately encountered problems--problems I've encountered in the past with other games.

I've discovered what I think is the problem, as well as possibly discovering the cause of defrag problems that others have experienced and reported in this forum.

Pando is essentially a P2P network that is used by numerous games to distribute the game files and patches. Pando does so by creating files that amount to .ISO files. Any of you that have any experience with .ISO files will know that they are treated by file systems/operating systems as a single file even though they are comprised of many individual files. The reasons for this are two-fold. P2P software such as Pando has to be able to find those files and uses CHECKSUMs to verify the correct file is being transfered--if the file is broken up on the harddrive, the CHECKSUM will be different and thus Pando cannot verify it is the same file (in the case of STO, .pigg files). All that being said, disk defragmentation software will not be able to defragment any of the files received via Pando until they are decompressed.

Cryptic does something a little weird with the game installer--the game downloads the entire game, but only decompresses the .pigg files as they are needed, and ONLY the portions needed by the game at that moment. What this means is that the .pigg files are never deleted and will always be butting heads with defrag software. Unfortunately, the game patches received as time goes by only update those same .pigg files, not the game files that have already been decompressed into the game directory.

Only Cryptic can fix this--other games have found a solution to this. FULL INSTALL OPTION.

Such an option allows the player to decide if they want to immediately decompress those .pigg files and delete the undefragmentable Pando download files. If the player so chooses, a flag is set. If the patcher sees this flag, it patches the files in the game directory. If the flag is not present, the patcher updates the .pigg files that Pando downloaded.

Problem solved.