Short & to the point....I'm getting 20 fps most of the time in- flight, however, every 2 seconds, the video intermitently hesitates and then it goes back to being smooth again. It happens even when the screen fps is showing 19 or 20 fps. I've dumped the fs9.cfg file and rebooted setting all the sliders to the left, simple weather and evey other frame killer I can think of... but to no avail. Is my video card going on me? I have a 3 year old Dell 2.4 mhz with a 128meg ATI 9700 TX radeon graphics card & 1gig of ram. It never did this before and I'm wandering if anybody has any ideas as to what might be causing this situation!!Regards,jack

Jack - It doesn't sound like the video card. More like something is grabbing the CPU cycles every couple of seconds. You might want to try opening Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) with FS9 running, clicking on the Processes tab, and see if there is any task other that fs9.exe that is periodically using the CPU more than just a few percent. That will sometimes help finding a running process that's causing the pausing/stuttering/hiccups.Doug

Thanks Doug. I'll give it a go and let you know.Regards,jack

Hi Doug,I tried your suggestion and one of the many things that are being displayed is unique under Image Name. It is called System Idle Process and it fluctuates between 43 and 93 and jumps between these numbers under the CPU column. I have no idea what items I should keep under Image Name. I should keep fs9.exe & Explorer and the other 20 or so, I'm not sure about as I have no clue as to what these things do...Any more help would be appreciated.Regards again,jack

Rather than chasing processes, I just stopped them. Unless your system must be running a bunch if background tasks while you are simming, why not get Fsautostart and let it handle the problem. Ken Salter gave us a gem in this program and it is quick and easy to set it up. It did the trick for me. Find it here in the library. R-

Thanks Ron. I'll check it out.Regards,jack

Using FSAutoStart, what would be the minimum operating items that you need to run FS2004? Obviously one of them would be FS9.exe and I think MS explorer, but I don't know which ones to cut out after these two...Can anybody shed any light on this.Regards,jack

>Using FSAutoStart, what would be the minimum operating items>that you need to run FS2004? Obviously one of them would be>FS9.exe and I think MS explorer, but I don't know which ones>to cut out after these two...Can anybody shed any light on>this.>>Regards,>jackHave you downloaded and ran FSAutoStart? It will list all Services and Programs that are running on your system and give you tips as to whether each process can be safely stopped. I generally took Ken's advice on which items to stop but experimented in some cases and was able to free up more memory space. If you let FSAutoStart defrag memory after it stops the processes (recommended), you'll know how much memory has been reclaimed and how much memory is available when FS9 starts.And the best thing is that when you close FS9, it resatarts every task that it stopped. I configured FSAutoStart to restart the computer when I close FS9. R-

The most common reason for the "hesitation" is the use of the autosave dll that most of us use. You can delete it to stop this or do as I have and change the time to saving every 10 minutes (600 seconds). You can change the save rate with a text editior.

Thank you Ron and John for your inputs. I'll try both of them.Regards,jack

Thank you Ron and John for your inputs. I'll try both of them.Regards,jack

Jack - The System Idle Process tells you how much of the CPU is not being usilized at any point in time, i.e., how much of the CPU power is idle. I like the recommendations below regarding FSAutostart. I've used it in the past and if you follow the recommendations as to what can be safely stopped you'll be OK.Doug

Sorry for stupitity, but I cannot locate teh autosave.dll in the FsAutoStart config. options listing. If you could possibly let me know where I might find this, I'd be most grateful.Thanks again for all your help.jack

Oh, a couple other odd things when I do a control/Alt/Delete and that is there is a lot of CPU activity going on in the dthtml.exe listing to the left and also the System Idle Process which flips from 75 to 95 constantly. The dthtml.exe is very active and it flips from 27 or so to 31 all the time.I wonder if this has something to do with my stutters when the fps is constantly running at 17 to 18 fps!!Also, I did a search and cannot find the autosave.dll file anywhere on my computer. Still searching for that one..Regards & thanks for any help you may have on these items..jack

It's me again :-) . The process called dthtml.dll is associated with MagicTune. Do you have a Samsung monitor with no adjustment buttons? If so, that's the software needed to make the monitor adjustments. But it sounds like it's using way too much of the CPU. Have you tried stopping that process? As I noted above, the System Idle Process is the idle portion of the CPU utilization and it sounds like most all of the load is the dthtml.dll process. I'd kill that process and see if it makes a difference running FS9 without it. Also, you won't have the autosave.dll on your system unless you have loaded the Autosave utility program (see http://www.schiratti.com/dowson.html ).Doug