First of all, Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones is StarForce protected. Starforce has a side effect of forcing your IDE controllers into PIO mode, this drops your transfer rates WAY down.
To check that open up your device manager, locate your primary (and perhaps secondary) IDE channels (under "IDE ATA/ATAPI-controllers"), then advanced settings where you should have something like "Transfer mode" (second field) which should read "DMA if available" and not "PIO only", the field below should read something like "Ultra DMA Mode 2".
Unfortunately you may not be able to fix this for good without removing StarForce, which means you can no longer play Prince of Persia (out of the box, at least). Read more about Starforce, how to remove it, how to detect it and a semi-complete list of games using it here.
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Otherwise it may be your Windows page file that is horribly fragmented. Grab this utility to check fragmentation and defrag if needed.
I hope one of these may help you out. |
