Very Low Framerates After Reinstalling Windows XP

[Guest boomer]

I recently had to have Windows XP reinstalled on my computer as my system was contaminated with over 25 different viruses. After the reinstall of Windows, I had to reinstall FS9 and all of the goodies that go with it.Also installed a good antivirus program.I am now experiencing some very low framerates as a result. I do know that the computer guy changed to a fat32 system from ntsf in order to make the removal of the viruses easier, but I have read that this could cause some slow downs and does not operate a efficiently as NTSF.My guess is also that he reinstalled new video drivers right over the top of the existing ones instead of removing the old ones first and then reinstalling the new ones.I am somewhat new to computers and their workings and would appreciate any comments of things that I could possibly check to find the cause of the low frame rate problems. All things being equal,using FS9, I am now getting 5-7 frames per second when I normally got 20.My system is as follows. I have an Athlon 2.6 cpu processor with a gigabyte motherboard and a Radeon 9800 Pro 128 meg ram video card.I have the video card settings in the control panel set to 2x antialiasing, 2x antisotropic filtering, and the agp setting on the Smartguard tab set to 4x. Nothing else has changed from before the reinstall.Any suggestions as to what I can do to help this problem?Thanks Roger Hollands

[Guest allcott]

I think you need to reinstall the chipset drivers and Directx 9.0b then the latest graphic card driver, in that order. You should have a version of DirectX installed, or else you wouldnt get any hardware acceleration, but it couldn't hurt to put it in again as part of a general driver update. I bet it's the chipset drivers and possibly your BIOS settings, but there should have been no need to touch those for a reformat.Also, I don't know why a techie would need to convert a drive to FAT32 to get rid of virusses when he obviously reformatted the drive - convert that back to NTFS before you do any of the above.Hope this helps Allcott

[Guest boomer]

Alcott:Thanks very much for your reply. Last evening , with the help of a friend, I removed the video card drivers and then did a fresh reinstall of the drivers. Seems to have worked!Thanks again for the helpRoger

[Guest allcott]

Gald to hear you got it back and running. Dont forget to change the drive back to NTFS!Allcott

[Guest boomer]

Alcott:Is that something that will affect the performance of FS9 adversly and if so, is changing back to NTSF something that I could do without having to take it back to the computer guy?Roger

[Guest houseofpain]

Roger,Yes FAT will adversly affect performance, so lose it....Conversion depends on how good you are with commands; I'm not sure if you can convert via the computer management console or not (GUI), but you can convert it easily via the command prompt by issuing the following syntax at the C:> prompt:convert "volume" /fs:ntfs "/v" "/x" A lot of this stuff depends on well you work with the command prompt & windows in general; I'm just not sure if Windows has a GUI converter though. Additionally there you can obtain software that does this for you...If you go back to the computer guy, be sure to have him explain further why he formatted in FAT to begin with.