On FSX, I consistently get 5-10 FPS at even moderately detailed airports, such as Charles De Gaulle in France. I've lowered almost every slider in Custom, changed the res to 1024x768x16, detail radius is small, mesh complexity is 4 and res is 305m, autogen is sparse, water's high 1.x, texture is 5m, 25% WoAI traffic and no boat or car. Nvidia GeForce 7500 LE 512MB graphics, 4GB (3.5 registered thanks to XP x32), Core 2 Duo @1.87GHz. Any and all fancy and graphics settings in the background such as even the blue win XP start bar have been disabled. I run FSX in windowed mode. Is there anything else I can do to improve my framerate?

LOL. You can't get your settings much lower than you have them now. You should be getting better FPS than 5-10 that's for sure. I would change your colors from 16 bit to 32 bit and then switch to full screen mode. You'll get more FPS in full screen. I doubt you're getting any "eye candy" with those low scenery settings though. I know you have defragged your harddrive and that's good as it will also allow FSX to run smoother. When FSX is first installed, you need to run your defragmentation program immediately because FSX is scattered all over your hard drive. Did you install SP1? That provides even more FPS. Big time! I would stay away from SP2 for now until you can get a good compromise with just SP1 installed. I hope you can find more FPS with some or all of my suggestions. Good luck!Ciao,Jim

..Nvidia GeForce 7500 LE 512MB graphics... This graphics card only has a 64-bit interface so you are never going to get high FPS from it. The 512MB is also misleading as it will probably only have 128MB of VRAM chips on the card, the remaining Memory it shares with your system RAM. So although it is buffering up to 512MB of data, most of data has to be moved about by the CPU rather than the GPU which is making a further hit on your FPS.RegardsJim

Great, thanks for the help. Time for a new graphics card... wonder how much that'll be... GeForce 8800? Which model of it?

I bought the MSI 8800GT Oced a while ago and love it....more bang for your buck, plus it runs cooler, but takes two slotshttp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...29&Tpk=nx8800gt

You may already know this but make sure you close everything you don't need. Disconnect from the internet,close firewall and anti virius(a big one for me). Turning off visual effects might help a little(right click My Computer(if you have XP)/Properties/Advanced/Performance(settings button)/select: Adust for best performance). Worth a shot.Bob

Lol. Every time I fly I restart my system, and close any programs I couldn't figure out how to stop on boot. Then I power up my laptop to browse the net and stuff, so my desktop isnt being taxed with firefox. I'm such a performance wanter that I switched my laptop to Ubuntu Linux 7.10.