Unfortunately there is no silver bullet. You must have fast CPU, fast memory and fast video card - all three. FS9 requires that you have a well balanced system otherwise your frame rates/quality will suffer.Michael J.________________________________________________________Right on the money there! It takes it all and then some!! I run 512mb ram. It runs just fine. Don't need a gig; but it would be nice. My system always ran fine with 512mb ram. Then I added a Norton virus scanner as I hooked up to the internet permanently. The virus scanner just completely hosed FS9 with 512mb ram. Then I got FSAutoStart and now turn off the continuous scan on Norton when running FS9. All's well again with 512mb ram. I check my unused ram after exiting FS9 and find I usually have around 410mb unused and available. Before FSAutostart, I usually only had around 310mb available. So FSAutoStart is a "thumbs up" as far as I'm concerned. You just have to manage your resources a bit better if you're ram challenged. I have to use all DXT3 textures with mipmaps. Any attempts to use the large 32bit textures and I find I'm challenged ram wise. I prefer DXT3 Textures anyway. They look just as nice and run much better performance wise.

We have two Michael J here :)But anyway buying faster CPU or faster video cards is very expensive RAM is cheap and RAM you don

RAM is cheap ...hehe; yeah right. Not my ram. Going from 512mb to 1024mb would cost me $450.00. (four 128mb sticks to four 256mb sticks) Don't think so!! Not yet anyway. I gotta remember to call Alienware and thank them for those four 128mb sticks :-fume

The 24-25 fps for movie quality (actual frames of still pictures) is what the human eye can process to the brain for us to see the motion as smooth normal movement. The computer is being asked to create movie in real time for our brain to process as smooth normal motion.I have a P4 3.0 ghz 1024 MB of RAM ATI 9800 pro 128mb running on Win. XP pro. I run all the sliders all the way up, 16s on the video card (I can't tolerate a jagged line). 256 appeture openning in the BIOS.I sometimes run AutoStart (Ken Salter AVSIM) for serious flying. At the start of AutoStart I show around 730 MB of memory, after the memory is defraged and everything gets shut down, I usually have around 830 MB. I seem to pick up about 100MBs with AutoStart shutting everything down. That's 830 MB out of 1024 MB to run the sim.In some circumstanes I do get down to the 10 fps range (mostly due to weather and smaller file sized 3D clouds). I have been running the fps slider on "unlimited" after reading a reviewers comment that in FS2004 it wasn't necessary to lock down the fps like we did in FS2002. I can't tell a whole lot of difference except I do get some averages up in the 30s fps.In those circumstanes that I noticed micro stutters the fps was still up around 20. It's my experience that the micro stutters from file swapping with the HD were independant of the fps that the processor was putting out.When I pan the textures are slow in loading but I think that is mostly do to the Pan rate increase that I changed in the FS9 cfg.This Dell 8300 is only a few months old and I expected a big increase in performance over my old P3 700mhz with 512 RAM MX 440 nVida card which I did get. I just wanted to say that I still see fps in the 10-20 depending on weather but that's because I want everything!

>RAM is cheap ...>>hehe; yeah right. Not my ram. Going from 512mb to 1024mb>would cost me $450.00. (four 128mb sticks to four 256mb>sticks) Don't think so!! Not yet anyway. I gotta remember to>call Alienware and thank them for those four 128mb sticks>:-fume lol well if you would buy a new system it would be really cheap. Yes Dell also likes to pull such stupid stunts to cut costs and prevent upgradability. But that Alienware that are marketing themself to the gamer market pulls that stunt is really unforgiveable! Send a mail bomb to them or something. But getting 2x512 should be cheaper anyway nowadays :) I mean I bought some of the most expensive OCZ 3700 EB memories out there today and it cost 340$ all in all. And that is almost as expensive as it gets. A lot of bang but little bang for the buck but I overclock then you can

i hear ya Bigshot. but you gotta admit, it smokes that ole DDR any day. happy flyin, fm

But really you haven

Yeah you lost me when speaking about your 500 Celeron :)Yes of course if sitting still but still my mem usage when flying is more than 800 mbyte wherever I fly and I don

Sounds like you have a pretty good box. Better than mine for sure..The low end fx-5200 video is the weak link on mine. I don't think upgrading the processor would do that much for me, being as I saw little difference when clocking this one up. I saw some of course, but not drastic. A new video card would greatly outdo the increase of say a 3.4 cpu and the present card...One thing I've noticed...The better the video card, the less likely you are to have sound problems. Or I think anyway. From what I've seen, sound stutters are very closely related to video overload. But even with my cheap "builders model" box, the performance is good enough for me at this time. I don't run that much add on scenery any more. Whats in there is generally good enough, unless I want a specific upgrade for an airport. If anything, complex panels and their overhead are more a potential problem here. And for that, yes, more ram is the answer most of the time. I do plan to upgrade to 1 gig before too long. But I really should dump the pc2700 stick I have, and switch to all pc-3200 or better. The cheap 2700 I have is not overclocking worth a hoot...My CPU seems raring to go, but the ram balks...Keep getting random errors...So I'm running stock speed for now. I sometimes wonder how much of a help the 1 meg of L2 cache I have is compared to the usual 512 k on a northwood. Thats the only advantage the prescott chip has over the northwoods..I suppose it can't hurt things...But it's probably not drastic..MK