My system is as follows:Dell, 4600, hyperthread, Pentium 4, 3.2 Gghz, 800 bus, 1 gb dual pathway RAM, 160 gb Hard Drive, 128 mb Gforce FX 5700 Ultra, Windows XP Home w/ SP1 and SP2, McAfee Anti virus (But is is disabled while in the simulator).Computer is 2 years old.All unnecessary services have been disabled, even including Backup, Indexing, Auto Updates and etc. Only those services needed to keep the machine running properly are enabled. All unnecessary background programs shut off. Freshly disk cleaned and defragged. The computer was freshly reformatted and only the XP OS and essential drives loaded.ONLY the base FS2004 simulation + the 9.1 patch is installed with all display sliders at high or higher. The FPS slider is set at unlimited. 1024 X 768I get less than 20 FPS with the default cessna sitting still running in 2D cockpit on the active runway at KSEA with clear skys and the KSEA photo textures disabled on the scenery library. Of course if I add more weather, AI traffic and etc., not to mention any third party addons the FPS goes to S***.I can't understand why my computer won't run FS2004 worth a ####. My system is certainly not shabby and I see on forums all the time that people who have lesser systems run much better frame rates than I do.Any ideas and suggestions would be appreciated. I have basicly given up flight simming because of this.Mike

Forgot, my sound is onboard by Sound Max. No seperate sound card is being used. I've tried sound acceleration from basic to max with no apparent improvement.Mike

what I can think of: Check your AA & AF setting to make sure they are not too high. Check you have the latest nvidia driver. Try disabling your onboard sound.Also FX5700 is not that fast a card.Jason

Just some general tips:Hit 'q' to turn off sound to see if the onboard sound is a problem. If fps jump way up with no sound, then you can look at getting a card. The Seattle area is actually very hard on frames, try other areas like LAX. Just for comparison. Also, set all the sliders back to default and see what happens. You may have set one too high. Some sliders have a huge impact on FPS. What percentage is your AI at? AI aircraft do hurt performance.