You know what I've actually noticed with the game? It always seemed to run faster BEFORE I upgraded, when I didn't even have the minimum requirements... I had a 80x586 133MHz with 16MB RAM (2MB was borrowed for video)... I recently figured out something about that... there's a conspiracy run by the computer and software companies. They force you to buy faster computers, because they give you a bunch of worthless programs that run all the time
I did the CTRL+ALT+DEL thing, and saw around 20 useless programs running... stuff that shipped with the hard drive, stuff that is very difficult to do a search and destroy mission on, and stuff that eats a LOT of processor power...
Just felt like ranting about how much faster my 133MHz 16MB RAM is than my new 550MHZ 128MB RAM in SEIV
Oh, something else I do in games, lots of AIs get weeded out: ClusterWars. In the setup, set Large Cluster galaxy with not all warp points connected. You will get 10-12 "clusters" of systems isolated from each other. The AI will grow as big as it can in their own cluster, then open warp points to the others. I just stay in my own for a while and let a few AIs gain dominance, then I go out and kill 5-7 semi-powerful AIs instead of 15-20 weakling AIs.