Do any of you use a RAM defragmenter? If so, what and would you recomend it? Do they seem to help FS performance?

FSAutostart is available here for no charge and it also shuts down unnecessary programs that you will have to set up manually. When I had a clunker computer the defragged ram was absolutely essential, the difference between black and white but now I seldom even bother for short GA flights in normal circumstances. For a 747 flight over London I still degrag the memory as it's the one thing that will bring my computer to a crawl, especially with VFR London scenery.. I guess it's a case of how much resources you have as to whether to defrag the RAM or not.I literally doubled my available RAM on my old computer by running FSAutoStart and two times not very much was still not very much but at least a lot better.

I do use Auto Start; never the defragmenter...do you think it would be a big help for a P4 2.6ghz machine w/ 1.0G of RAM?

I've used the option in FS Autostart, and the only difference was how long I had to wait for the defrag to finish. It never had any noticeable impact on my performance at all.

I think with only 1 Gig of Ram it would be quite helpful. It sure was for me when I had only 1 gig. You can easily run FSAutostart to just defrag, it takes about 1 to 2 minutes. I have two programmed icons for mine, the full Monty and the defrag only version.I find with my two gigs there is usually about 1.6 gigs available, in your case that would be about .6 gigs available. Getting another .1 gig or .2 gig in that case should help somewhat.

>in your case that would be about .6 gigs available. Getting another .1 >gig or .2 gig in that case should help somewhat.Why would it help? Think it through. I have only 1 gig of RAM and regardless what and where I fly, I never use more than around 650 meg of it. I never run out of RAM or have memory errors. Why would increasing the amount of RAM - by either using Autostart or putting in more physical RAM help.I am not knocking you for your opinion - but would like a real explanation of how extra RAM would help .Barry

My opinion was simply based on my own observations Barry. When I had a much slower computer and only 1 gig of RAM the FS9 performance was much better after a RAM defrag. It loaded textures better, used the page file less and had fewer blurries and stutters. I don't pretend to understand the technicalities I've just reported what I saw and assumed it might similarly help someone else a bit.To use your example I often didn't have the requisite 650 meg available, I might have just .2 or .3 gigs available depending on prior usage. Similarly now I often have only 1.3 gigs available which is still more than enough.

Disk defrag are useful - memory degrag is not something thatcan NOT be done or relevant. You have no control over how the memoryis "paged" by windows.As for the amount of memory....A program can access 2.14 Gbyte of memory (somewhere) unless youcan use 64bit windows or some hi-memory extension not implementedwithin FS9. Windows runs multiple programs, they all can access 2.14 Gbyte ofmemory, though most will not. There are about 14 fundamentalprocesses in windows XP, and lots more that find themselves on yourcomputer - hence the "autoruns.exe" and other programs that controlwhat is running.The memory that all the programs use (ie FS9 and up 2.14 Gbytes)can be in RAM or "paged" out onto disk to the paging file. You setthis in Windows as the "virtual ram". If you run FS9, you probablywant to fix this as a minimum of 3Gbytes and max it at about 4Gbytes;remember multiple programs want to use the computer at any one timeeven when using your FS9 that can only use 2.14Gbyte in total.More RAM allows more of the FS9 program to stay "resident" in RAMat any one time, this makes more of things accessible quickly. Thisincludes scenery in particular. More RAM therefore tends to reduce stutter where you access scenerythat has not yet been accessed - so is still on disk - or scenerythat got paged out since the OS ran out of RAM and paged the datato disk.There are articles that discuss improving fps with more RAM. Idon't understand how this can be the case as more RAM can onlyeffect the latency associated with disk access - hence stutter. Imay be wrong, and tests suggests that it can increase fps. Maybesomeone can enlighten me on this.RegardsTom

I think all the "ram defrag" tools do is attempt to allocate as much memory as possible, thus forcing other process memory to be paged out as possible, before starting up FS. But once FS is running, the memory manager will determine how much ram a process will get for its "working set". IIUC the real problem of address fragmentation is with virtual memory, not ram, aside from maybe the GART/agp aperture.The proof would seem to be to run the performance monitor and check page faults/ sec for the fs processes.scott s..

OK, sorry I have read about RAM defrag - but it seams a bit oddto me - but I am only a linux person - I don't see this can workfor a single big process. But I will shut up and go away :)

>I've used the option in FS Autostart, and the only difference>was how long I had to wait for the defrag to finish. It never>had any noticeable impact on my performance at all. No wonder. Memory defragmenting is complete nonsense under any modern operating system. This might be a relict from Win 9x days where it did make sense, but today it's useless.People who claim differently should read and learn how a modern vm works and then explain in which way a memory defragmenter could help, when any process under a modern 32 or 64bit operating system *always* gets its unfragmented and contiguous 2gig address space.What most of these defragmenters do is quite simple: They try to force the operating system to release as many memory as possible. The only effect this can cause might be faster program loading, because the memory is already there when the application loads (if it isn't, the os will take care to make it available anyway). Of course, there is little to none overall benefit, because the memory defragger itself will waste the time which is later saved when loading the application.Besides, under Windows NT based operating system, an application has no way to take any influence on the operating systems own memory management. Any application can only access its own memory space, so the only way to force other applications to release physical memory is to allocate big chunks of memory and let the OS do its job. But this is exactly the same what happens when you start MSFS without prior "memory cleanup".