I must preface this with the fact that I've pretty much searched throughout and applied all the "FR improvement" methods, using some, messing with the settings, the cfg file, etc.. etc..But there is one thing that I haven't been able to resolve. Two observations that it "seems" that FS9 does that I don't know how to change. Again, these are guesses, but this is what I think it going on and if anyone understands this better, please feel free to comment!1) Filling up memory somewhere until FR drops. The reason I say this is that I will have great FRs for about 20 minutes, when things start to get a little jerky, and switching between views causes stuttering.To fix the problem, I go into Display, make a hardware change (Trilinear to Bilinear, and then back again for example). As soon as I do this, all of a sudden everything is smooth, high FRs again for about another 20 or 30 minutes. (I've learned to do this before each approach). It's as if I've "cleared" something out of memory but I have no idea. It's just a guess.2) Reloading outside view of aircraft from disk?? I don't know if this is related to #1 above, but many times if I switch to outside view, I hear the disk being accessed, the plane is gray until the textures are filled in, then everything is ok. Not a big deal but just wondering what's going on.When I first had this issue, I doubled my RAM from 512M to 1 Gig. This did NOTHING to help the problem. In task manager, I see FS9 only using about 300 Meg of RAM, and I'm wondering why it's not using the extra RAm to maybe store textures or whatever..I have my graphics set at a medium level. Turning ANY setting from high to low doesn't help these problems. I get about the same FRs, but no matter where I have graphics settings, over time I start to get the stutters..I've updated my video drivers, followed some directx tweaks, cfg tweaks, etc...I have a medium speed PC (1.8GHZ, 1G ram, 128Meg nvidia) plenty of hard drive space (defragged)...I always shut down as many processes as I can. I apologize for this long "essay" lol.. I'm just wondering if anyone else knows anything about how FS9 deals with RAM, or if anyone has had similar problems and solved them.Overall my sim experience is ok. I can deal with the stutters as I said above by occasionally changing the display settings, then changing them back. Any advice, information, or similar experiences, I would welcome just to know that I'm not crazy or that there is maybe something else I can do to my system to improve it.Thanks again for your time!Jeff

Jeff,Stuttering is a major issue which has been discussed in great length by other AVSIMMERS within this forum. There are so many possibilities to conquer the stuttering problem. It depends on the system. The cause of my stutters was a bad installation of my video card drivers (even though everything indicated they were installed correctly and working properly). For others it has been to move the FPS slider to unlimited, to 40, to 30, or to 25 to fix the problem. Your solution could be the 128MB video card you have instead of a 256MB card. I doubt it though as people with even the fastest systems have stutters once in a while. I look forward to the new Flight Sim (if and when it is developed) as it will be programmed to use the latest video card technology and DirectX. If you haven't already, I suggest reading some of the problems/solutions at the Routine System Maintenance - Windows XP thread; the FS2004 and Windows XP Optimization Guide V2 (especially the thread written by OneTinSoldier); and the FS2004 Tips and Tricks thread. Good luck.Jim