General Maint Tips for FS2K2????

[Guest 727Fan]

I've had the sim on the hard drive for 8 months now and I've noticed performance degradation. KORD used to display at 13fps at the terminal. Normal flight is set at 25fps. Now KORD displays at 8fps at the terminal. I'm using XP Home, P4A 2.0Gig, GeForce 3, 512DDR Ram.I remember someone a while back posted problems with the sim after doing a disc defrag so I've been avoiding that tool.Anybody have any advice or suggestions regarding how I can bring the sim's performance back to its previous state without having to re-install? Thanks!!Rick

[Carabou 0]

Hi,I have found that a disc defrag usually helps increase performance in FS2002. I've used it many times in the past few years with windows 95, 98 and now ME and have never had a problem.I'd suggest you first do a scan disc and then the defrag. ALso, before doing he scan disc it would be usefull to delete files, folders etc. which you don't need. Also, clear out the recycle bin and so on. If you have any programs you want to remove, do it before the scan disc/defrag. Lets face it, at some point in your computers lifetime you'll probably have to do a defrag.I haven't heard of anyone having FS2002 problems after a defrag.Hope this helps.Howard

[Guest]

Also try deleting your fs2002.cfg file, then start up and re-sellect all options. FS will build a new cfg file for you, which may solve many problems including degradation.

[Guest]

I am the one who has problems after defragging in Windows XP. Two weeks later and I'm still having stutters with FS2002. Even after changing out my motherboard and adding another 256megs of RAM. I now have 768megs of RAM and I strongly believe the stuttering is from defragging my hard drive. I didn't have any problems before I defragged and the problem surfaced immediately after the defrag. Eventually I'll get around to reformatting the drive. Never had a problem with Win98 and I am considering going back to it. Bob

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi all.I have WindowsXP, with the SP1 service pack installed, and I defrag every other day. I have 2 hard drives, and no partitions... just a C: and a D: drive. They are NTFS, and I installed XP as a clean install on a freshly formatted hardddrive, rather than trying any type of upgrade from '98. I do not have any kind of Norton program running. I manually check for viruses weekly, and check downloads for viruses after downloading... again manually. I have no 3rd party memory managers, video card tuners, overclocking, or firewalls in use.Use task manager to determine the number of active processes running right now.I have 16 processes currently running ( including one internet explorer for this post, and one task manager ).My System Idle Process reads 99%.If your system has more processes running, or the idle isn't 99%, you very well may have problems with FS2002.The Norton series of programs causes a huge amount of problems for game users... get rid of them. Use the default WindowsXP firewall, which does an excellent job. Track down those extra background processes, and get rid of them, until at least your system idle is 99%. Manually check downloads for viruses. Disk clean and defrag weekly. If you have more than one partition on a harddrive...why? Modern systems don't need partitioning. Have you fooled with memory management?.. stop it. Quit running overclocking and tweaking programs, they won't get you anymore than 12%.. so why bother, and mess up your system? The XP firewall is fine,as is it's memory management.-----------Honestly, many users with stuttering or lockups when using FS2002 either have a serious hardware overheating problem, or malfunction.Or their PC software environment is so screwed-up, they need to reformat all your hardrives ( with complete surface scanning ), and start from scratch... It's not because XP has messed up your system, but because you have messed it up, or you have defective hardware. Get rid of the junk from your system, replace bad hardware, and it will run fine.Dick

[Guest]

Just wanted to add that there is no need to get rid of apps like Norton AV etc. Just run msconfig (Start/Run/msconfig) and disable everything you don't want to run on the startup tab. Then you get a nice clean reboot with nothing running in the background to hog resources. Edit: As an aside, I have a less powerful system than yours and I leave Norton Internet Security running when I use FS2k2 as I tend to stay online to use ActiveSky. My framerates remain in the low 20's and I don't seem to get any stutters. I am really puzzled why some people with pretty decent specs have problems running FS. I'm leaning towards the performance of your hard drive at the moment. It seems that regardless of how much memory you have or how fast it is, your CPU, and your graphics card are, FS spends a lot of time reading from your HD. I have a 7200rpm drive with a pretty low seek time - I wonder if that makes more of a difference than you would expect?

[Guest]

1. If one can afford it then keep one PC for FS only. Else be extra careful with spywares, viruses etc.2. Defrag regularly3. Dont experiment too much with drivers4. Keep 3rd aircrafts to the essential ones which you like. Discard the rest. Same with 3rd party utilities5. While flying unload antivirus.6. If your CPU is AMD be extra careful of CPU temperature.7. After all this if things go awry dont curse me!

[Guest]

Guys trust me on this one. I have done all the above mentioned, been building PC's for years. Although I do learn new stuff everyday. I installed a new drive when I went to Win XP. So everything is fresh. I defragged again today just for grins and I'll be damn if FS2002 doesn't still sutter. I'm at my wits end. I did notice that in the defrag log one of the FS2002 sound files called usenglishbig.gvp is listed as being unable to be defragged. Shows 25 fragments and a size of 174MB. The stutters do appear to occur when the throttle sounds decrease or increase. Anyone think an uninstall of FS2002 and a reinstall might help? Other than that I can only think of doing a reformat of the drive again and start over.Bob