I've just emailed Alex about this. Thanks Trip_lane and everyone else for helping me out!

Trip give me your performance report for FS2k2 on your machine. Any "microstutters" when taxiing or through clouds?Noel

Noel - The answer on the microstutters is a "not usually". I can sometimes see a bit of a very high-rate stutter on steep turns when flying a complex aircraft such as the DreamFleet Archer in high-density scenery. Clouds seem to have no effect and everything's fine when taxiing. I usually fly with everything maxxed except water reflections, which are turned off (I hate the look of the water with the reflections on). And I usually use 38-meter mesh, 4xS Antialiasing, 8x (64-tap) anisotropic filtering, and the mipmap bias set at -1.500 . The high-rate stutter is quite independent of the framerate - I've seen it with the framerate as high as 100 and as low as 10. But I think a certain bit of the "jerkiness" is just inherent to FS2002. A couple of weeks ago a non-gamer friend and I loaded FS2002 on his new machine just because I had to see what the result would be. And it showed about the same degree of high-rate stutter there also (good FPS though). His specs? Northwood 2.53 OC'd to 3.4Ghz (water cooled) with 2GB RAM and a Ti4600 OC'd to some astronomical number. At least I now know it's not my paltry 2.7Ghz that's the problem :-) .TripNorthwood 2.2a at 2.72Ghz Abit TH7II-R512MB Samsung 40ns PC800Gainward 64MB GF4 Ti4200 300/57030.30's DX8.1 WinXP ProInwin case / Enermax 431W PSU3DMark2001SE = 12055http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=4088814

Yes, which makes me wonder once again if my theory holds water. High rate stutter INDEPENDENT of framerate--this IS interesting.Some time ago I began wondering if this wasn't a function of a factor no one is looking at, namely low level continuous disk read activity. How so? Well, for starters, I always have 100mb or more of free ram while FS is running, yet the sim still continuously asks for disk reads during flight. This is demonstrated in the screen print of disk reads during flight using System Monitor.What's interesting to me is that when I load FSFLightMax's huge database during flight, FS comes to almost a complete stop, or a least a slide show while the db is loading. It's easy to see the heavy disk read during this 30 second time is interfering with FS's simming during initialization. If this is the case, how is FS affected by the continous disk reads that occur during normal flight? You will not see your drive light come on, because the reads are smaller and of shorter duration, but the do occur continuously as seen in the screen print. I'm wondering of a SCSI U160 system will improve this situation, because SCSI does not use the CPU as IDE does to process I/O activities. The ONE person I asked on this who had a nice fast Cheetah X15 system in fact said his stutters WENT AWAY since switching to this pricy drive system.FYI, Bubba Wolford of SimHQ felt the concept has merit and says he is working to set up a test of this very thing: Cheetah X15 SCSI drive vs IDE in flight sims. I am building a new system now and have been stuck on whether to foot the bill for a SCSI based system. Your comments have made me definitely think hard again about doing this. I was hopeful a super high end P4 would elimiate microstutters, but alas this is clearly not the case from your experience.Noel