Flight sim friends,This is my first post on this forum, though I have read extensively.While I am so happy to hear of all of the great reports with state of the art systems

If anyone happens to respond... please know... I have reinstalled FS-9 two or three times. Thanks, Steve

Sounds a lot like a graphics card issue. If you are sure you have installed the newest drivers for all correctly, then go into the Bios and under AGP options, disbale fast writes. To get the AGP options might require a few further entries, mine is under Chipset config then AGP settings.

Thanks for your reply, Kurt...I checked the BIOS earlier... and "fast writes" is disabled. Thanks for the thought.I HAVE installed the latest drivers but they DON'T work with FS-9 That is part of my problem. Whenever I install any of the newer drivers .. AGP appears "enabled" in the Dxdiag program. I think... my problem is solved. But when I run the test program... I get error messages. AND... then one of two things happens when I load FS-9.I get one of two error messages while the splash screen is still present. Either I get an error message... stating that there was an invalid page fault in panels.dll OR one stating there was an a page fault in the directxhelp program.It just locks up at that point.On occasion (with certain newer vesions of the drivers) when FS-9 does open, when I go to the settings, Display, hardware tabs... the card is not identified... completely blank... and there are no screen resolutions present. The sim is not hooked to my card at all.So my only option is to reload the old orginal drivers and run which run the program only for a few minutes before some kind of lock up.Maybe I should buy a different video card and try. What would you recommend? I'm not very knowledgeable... but I know the cpu carries the day and the vid card is not the "savior" but what kind would you recommend... is 128 or 256 megs adequate? Or is even 64 adequate. I would not like to pay top dollar for a card that will not be my ultimate card when I (hopefully) get a new system at the end of the year.Thanks to you and everyone who takes time to read.Take care, Steve

There is no doubt a GeForce 3 Ti 200 is an old card. Before that though, your having lots of problems and I think it may be more windows related, when was the last time you did a fresh install of XP and are you using SP2? 64MB is defintley not enough, I would say 128MB is good, most new games, like Half Life 2, minimum is 64 and recommended is 128MB, most games do not requier 256, while it will last longer, if your on a budget, it's not worth it. Now for talks about a new graphics card, a GeForce 6600GT 128MB card is nice, and I know they retail for about 300CAD, ATI doesn't have many options for AGP with there new chips that are not crazy expensive, all though there is nothing wrong with a 9800 PRO. It's really up to you, personally I would say the 6600GT, its the newest, has all the latest technology and is relativley affordable.

Thanks, Kurt. I am running under Windows 98. I plan to do an install of Windows XP this weekend and see if that will help some of my problems. Then I will consider the 6600 GT card after I see what improvements I have.QUESTION: What mother board are you using for your AMD 3500+ chip? Is it hard to cool? That seems like the best choice to me right now. How long have you had it and how do you like it? I am using an AMD 1800+ chip. Can I expect about twice the performance if I use that?Thank you. Where are you located, Kurt?Steve