I have a question regarding "micro-pauses" in FS2004.My system is fairly new and up-to-date:AMD Athlon 64 3400+, Abit KV8-Pro, Via-Chipset with lastest 4in1-driver, 1 GB Corsair VS 512/400, Sapphire ATI Radeon RX-800 256 MB videocard with latest Omega-Driver, on-Board-Sound, Samsung S-ATA 160GB HDD, WinXP Home with SP2, FS2004 with patch 9.1.Overall I am happy with the performance of FS9 on my system (graphic, frames, very little stuttering, loading of textures, no crashes,

Hi Walter,A couple of things to try... make sure Sound Acceleration in DirextX is set to "Basic". Click on Start>Run> type "dxdiag" (without the quotes), wait for the DirextX Diagnostic Tool to stabilize, and then click on the "Sound" tab. In the window titled "DirectX Features" move the slider on the left to the "Basic" position (second tic from the left).If that doesn't help, you should try completely disabling sound in Device Manager. Just disable it... do not remove the feature. Then go fly to test.Hope this helps,Greg

Hello GregThank you for your feedback.I did set the sound acceleration in DirectX on "basic" following recommendations that I had found in other tweak guides before. The strange thing was - when I checked yesterday after your posting - that it was again on maximum (however, I was sure that I had reduced it before). I wonder how it came back to maximum. Anyway after reducing it to 'basic' the micro-pauses were still there.I also tried your second recommendation and disabled the sound completely in the device manager. I really hoped that this would help as I also suspected the 'sound' being the culprit for my problems. However, also flying without sound, there were still some of these micro-pauses. I was even planning to install a separate sound card (and disabling my onboard sound in the BIOS), but after these findings I am afraid that this also will not help.However, I got another tip from a guy in a German forum. He has almost the same system as I do and had the same problem. According to him his micro-pauses came from the harddisk. Based on a recommendation in a computer magazine he tried to plug the HD to the Via Southbridge instead of the S-ATA Promise plug on the motherboard and his micro-pauses are gone now. Will have to try this.RegardsWalter

>However, there are disturbing micro-pauses (sometimes every>1-2 minutes, sometimes longer) when the screen quickly freezes>for maybe a quarter or half a second. The key is how long those pauses last. I bet they are not 1/2 sec but more like 1/5 sec or even less. But human eye can catch them - I also have similar pauses, they are even more frequent but they definitely never last as long as 1/2 sec. I would say my typical micro pause is around 1/10 sec. I doubt there are systems whith absolutely no such pauses or some folks simply fail to detect them.Michael J.WinXP-Home SP2,AMD64 3500+,Abit AV8,Radeon X800Pro,36GB Raptor,1GB PC3200,Audigy 2

Yes, I agree, Michael, maybe half a second is a bit long.But I can definitly say that the pauses vary in length and that they are easily dedectable on my system.Walter

I would support your observations and add that the more complexity you add to the simulation: complex addon aircraft with multi-megabyte textures, and addon scenery with lots of detail, the more likely it is that these micro-pauses occur.To verify this, go back to some default remote scenery location, with a default aircraft like the Beech Baron, and voila, the pauses disappear (at least on my system).I think we are simply pushing our systems to the limit and at some time, something has to give.. At least, the days of big time stuttering, like in FS5 seem to have disappeared..