Is anyone using Norton Speed Disk to optimize their hard disk performance? This utility allows the user to place specific files and folders at the beginning of the disk during the defragmentation process which would, apparently, provide better performance. It would appear that if one could place FS2K2 or scenery files at the beginning of the disk overall performance would improve. This may not improve frame rate that much, but if it would allow a faster loading of scenery files, it might be worth doing. Any thoughts?Airbus

I doubt if the difference would be very noticeable. Defragging a drive is a must, since a highly fragmented drive will really bog down the PC performance in general, but I doubt moving the FS files will help much.http://members.cox.net/pstepanoff/images/OK_c2.gifPete S

Been there. Done that. Makes no difference at all. - Trip

Yes indeed, I for one swear by Norton and have been using his utilities for years. Speed Disk is quick and efficient. I used it frequently with my Windows 98 installation and now I run it roughly once a week with Windows XP as part of Norton SystemWorks 2002.I have never encountered any problems and just accept the default settings which seem to be fine.I have 2 hard drives and all partitions are formatted as NTFS. On the first is installed Windows XP on its own 5gig partition (C drive) and the rest of this 60gig drive is being used for program installations including FS2002. The second drive (40gig) is used for 'experimental stuff', data, backups and the bulk of the swap file. It also still contains copies of all my Windows 98 installations (non-functioning) which proved a great boon during the rebuild under Windows XP. As an example, I installed FS2002 de novo on my D drive to establish the correct registry references and then overwrote the installation with my highly configured stable installation preserved on the E drive. Worked like a charm and all I have had to do since then is reinstall certain addons as appropriate, again to reestablish registry entries.What I find a little surprising is how quickly the C drive becomes fragmented under XP but Speed Disk soon sorts it out unerringly each and every time. Sometimes I have to repeat the exercise to achieve best optimization but I'm probably erring on the fussy side ;)Yes, Norton Speed Disk is the business and appears utterly reliable. By ensuring your drive is optimized in this way you are ensuring that the speed of data transfer to system memory occurs as fast as the drive will allow since time will not be wasted searching for fragments of files scattered around the disk. This is where you will notice an improvement in FS2k performance. Once that data is in memory, performance and fluidity of the sim is dictated by the speed of your CPU, Graphics Card, quality of the mainboard and all the installed drivers.My System Spec:Gigabyte GA-8IRXP MoBoPIV 2.2A512MB Crucial PC2100 DDR Ram3D Blaster4 Ti4400 (Creative's 30.82 driver variants tweaked with RivaTuner LOD -0.1 and Anisotropy forced level 8)SB Audigy Player (Drivers version 5.12.01.0253 Signed)Deskstar 120GXP UDMA100 HDs x 2 (60 and 40 Gig)CH Products USB Yoke, Pedals and FighterstickPlantronics Headset and Mike comboPlexWriter 40/12/40APioneer DVD-106SWindows XP Home Edition (SP1)DirectX 8.1Mike :-wave

I have Norton Systemworks 2001 - bought it for a windows 98 machine, and have not installed it yet on my new Gateway/XP box. Will it run ok on XPhome? It says Windows2000 and NT so I am guessing it might - it certainly should understand NTFS.I have not installed it yet, as the machine came with NAV 2002 and a 90 day subscription. SHould I toss NAV 2002 and install Systemworks 2001??

You'll need either the 2002 or 2003 versions for XP. - Trip