Hi,Before I ask anything, I know you'll want to know my specs...so here goes:P4 1300256MB PC800 RDRAMGeForce 3 64MBSB Live! PlatinumXP Pro (SP1)Office XP Small BusinessI never used to have ANY kind of performance issue with FS2K2 at all. I typically run PSS aircraft with the UK2000 scenery. Framerates were always lower when using these aircraft and sceneries for obvious reasons, but never unacceptably low. Just recently things seem to be getting worse however. Frequently when I close FS2K2, I've got a yellow exclamation mark on my taskbar telling me I have low system resources. My framerates are getting worse, to the point of unplayable and my hard drive is always working, especially when using FS. I have already done the following:Deleted a bunch of stuff from the hard drive which I no longer use. Did a defrag (it was 16% fragmented). I always get rid of a bunch of stuff out of RAM before I start FS. I've LOWERED the slide bars in the display settings in FS (much to my chagrin). I d/l a RAM monitoring program. Right now, and normally in Windows it says I have 100MB free. When I'm running FS2K2 it goes down to about 20-30MB free.Although I have seen some slight improvement in performance, it is still not like it was. I ordered another 256MB of RAM today, since I think that this will help. I was wondering what else I can do without going too far down the hardware upgrade route? Can I do any more with Windows to make it run more efficiently? In order to run high-end stuff like I do on FS2K2, am I looking at a mobo/CPU upgrade? Any hints would be helpful.Sorry for the lengthy post, but I wanted to be SPECIFIC!! :-)Thanks,Ray

I think you are on the right track by increasing your RAM to a total of 512 MB RDRAM. Make sure you get RDRAM that matches exactly what you are currently using. Win XP is a real RAM hog and can easily gobble up 165 MB.A few other things to check - try disabling your sound card to see if this makes a big difference. Check your system for any IRQ conflicts. I assume you turn off your virus checker and any other background programs while running FS2002.Try running dxdiag - check each tab and run the tests to see if it finds any problems.Hope this helps,Dale