Load times

Does anyone know some effective ways to reduce load times? Zone-to-
zone loading seems pretty quick, but it takes me several minutes to
get from desktop to Norrath. The longest load, obviously, is between
character select and the game world. It just seems kinda crazy. I
remember the long loads from long ago, but my PC then was much worse
than the one I have today (although it's pretty terrible). Even WoW
loaded about 3 or 4 times faster...and WoW doesn't have zones. I'm
sure there's some sort of efficiency thing I'm missing.

Anyway.

Another thing I was curious about, because of the load times. Does EQ
now have a feature similar to the EQ2 launcher where you can actually
choose your character at the patcher? I've seen the quick-login to
the character select, but it would be great to knock that out, too,
since it's about a minute and a half to load the char select screen.

"Eric D. Braden" <bradenericd.TakeThisOut@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1184259491.715120.142850@22g2000hsm.googlegroups.com...
> Does anyone know some effective ways to reduce load times? Zone-to-
> zone loading seems pretty quick, but it takes me several minutes to
> get from desktop to Norrath. The longest load, obviously, is between
> character select and the game world. It just seems kinda crazy. I
> remember the long loads from long ago, but my PC then was much worse
> than the one I have today (although it's pretty terrible). Even WoW
> loaded about 3 or 4 times faster...and WoW doesn't have zones. I'm
> sure there's some sort of efficiency thing I'm missing.
>

EQ is a memory hog, get more memory.

> Anyway.
>
> Another thing I was curious about, because of the load times. Does EQ
> now have a feature similar to the EQ2 launcher where you can actually
> choose your character at the patcher? I've seen the quick-login to
> the character select, but it would be great to knock that out, too,
> since it's about a minute and a half to load the char select screen.
>

Only quick server select.