Well, I did a defrag with O&O as suggested, now I have virticle lines in the sky, plus the water has weird looking things happening to it. Here's what I did.Defragged twice with O&OLoaded FSX as usual.Started seeing virticle lines in the sky and funky looking water.Ran driver cleaner and replaced ALL the ATI drivers and CCC.That didn't work.I removed FSX.CFG and let FSX build another one, still no go.Adjusted settings in CCC to see if there was a switch thrown that wasn't before. Still nothing. To say that I'm P.O.d is an understatement.Anyone see this happening before? I need help!TurnipSPECS:VISTA Home Basic 580 WATT Sunbeam PowerCrucial Ballistix 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAMASUS P5N-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 Conroe 2.33GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80557E6550ATI Radeon 3870 512250 GB WD SATA HD 120 GB WD IDE HD[/url]

O&O is not going to cause FSX problemsIts easy to say "I did this.. so it must be the product that caused this"I have no idea what the problem is... The render issues you are seeing are hardware/driver related, not defrag related, or bad or corrupt textures which can also be introduced by add-ons. All a defrag is going to do is make files load smoother. It will NOT have any affect on the rendering engine and change colors or make lines appear.Something else is wrong.

Hi Nick, thx for the response. I too believe that it is a driver issue. That is why I ran driver cleaner and reinstalled everything. I have seen files get corrupted when defragging with WinXP defrag utility. What baffles me is that FSX runs great before defrag and immediately after, the graphics take a nose dive. I'm stumped. I only have FTX installed and one plane which were in when before the defrag. I wonder if the problem could be from the Catylist Control Center? I did uninstall and reinstall it also.TurnipSPECS:VISTA Home Basic 580 WATT Sunbeam PowerCrucial Ballistix 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAMASUS P5N-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 Conroe 2.33GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80557E6550ATI Radeon 3870 512250 GB WD SATA HD 120 GB WD IDE HD[/url]

Well some people here are not going to like/accept what i have to say but....I bought a popular defragger last year and used it on a perfectly fine opperating system......I even allowed it to *optmize* my HDD....Which is what the *selling point* of this utility was all about.......Well everything went south after that.....When i checked the defragg against my XP one it was solid red.....So I set it up again to move all my files back where they came from(un-optmized) a process that takes about 15 hours.....Long story short.......My HDD has never since then been able to totally defrag itself with the XP defragger.I never have used the *Bought* one again..I have reformatted the entire drive,reinstalled everything, and given up......To this day it has,and will always have hugh red bars after defragg.....i have a new puter,in for repaire under warrenty,so am back to this old beast again for a while..Tryed to defragg this morning ,just for fun,and again it would not...Never again will allow a defragger to move files on my HDD......

Sorry to hear about that Harley. I think that with my setup now... I have "optimized" FSX as far as it will go. I can fly along great for about 10 minutes then the system starts to really lag and start "pulsing" for lack of a better term. If I save a fligth from where the lagging starts then reload the fligth at that same point... it's fine for about 10 minutes then starts to pulse again. this HAS to be a programming issue albeit I know nothing about any of it. I do know what I have done with this system over the last month to get it to work right. By now, I should have a lean mean flying machine. NOT!

Before my Raptor HD died, it was bloated,almost full and had tons of crap loaded. I had both FS9 and FSX along with tons of addons.I had FSX running pretty good.The hd crashed and I lost it all.With a new Raptor 150 with only FSX and the needed files, it ran no better than before.I bought 0&O defrag and to be honest, I cannot see any difference.Ive tried all name,space, and other than getting that warm fuzzy feelin, I see No DIFERENCE in performance.For me it was nothing more than a $50 placebo.I guess the raptor is so fast, it does not care if the HD is fragged or not.

Turnip, It sounds like to me like your GPU may be overheating or your CPU. Does your case have good air flow? Maybe try running with the side of your case off and see if that helps. Are you able to monitor your temps if so what are they? Sorry to hear you are having so many problems but Im sure with all the help on this forum you will get it sorted out soon. Jim Jam O&O keeps my HD in great shape and did notice a overall smootheness in the sim after using it. You hard drive must have already been in good shape. Let it go for awhile without defragging and I bet you will change your mind.

Hi Turnip,I agree with Nick that defragging could not cause the problems you describe. Something else has happened to cause them.However, I see you have two HDs. Is FSX on a separate one to the OS? If not then it's something you (and everyone) should consider. Mixing FSX files with those of an OS compromises both. I have two HDs and have partitioned the second drive into two. FSX resides on the outer part and FS9 on the inner one.Nothing else resides on either partition. That ensures FSX and FS9 load as quickly as possible and will have zero fragmented files.Once you sort out your current problems I would strongly recommend that course of action to you. Hard drives are cheaper than ever making it an easy option.

>What baffles me is that FSX runs>great before defrag and immediately after, the graphics take a>nose dive.Hi,If you wanna take O&O out of the equation, just run a defrag with Vista defrag. If you still have the same problem, the problem probably wasn't caused by O&O. If problems are gone, the problem probably was caused by O&O.But I'm quit convinced that your problems has nothing to do with O&O if you use the latest version for your Vista OS. I would guess that youv'e change a FSX display setting resulting in an increased load on our graphics card. Increased AI setting and flying over a dense urban area?Ulf BCore2Duo X6800 3.3GHz4GB RAM Corsair XMS2-8500C5BFG 8800GTX, Creative SB X-FiFSX Acc/SP2, Vista 32

JWENHAM, My CPU and GPU are running at about 39C at idle. I haven't checked the temp while running FSX but when running CRYSIS it stays nice and cool. I have 6 fans on my case plus the stock CPU fan. As I had just built the system, I haven't replaced the side panel yet so there is ample air flow. The 3870 is a single slot card which does not occupy another slot for the fan. I strongly feel that heat is not an issue. ;*)NICK N: I do have 2 hard drives, however, the second 120GB IDE drive hasn't been hooked up in a couple of weeks. I should remove that from my signature. If I reformat that IDE drive, should I re-install FSX on it so that it is on anohter drive seperate from the OS?

I wouldFSX on its own drive and then defragmented correctly using 3 passes of COMPLETENAME defrag with reboots between each pass will significantly help your drive performance with FSXGetting FSX off the OS drive helps keep the application free of normal OS fragmentation. The OS drive will always fragment, constantly, becasue of the nature of the design. By placing FSX on its own drive you are getting rid of that problem and the defrag program only deals with FSX instead of Vista.. which is a POS OS to begin with. I only use XP x64 for that reason. I will wait till Vista gets its SP2 patch before I will use it for anything other than testing.I dont care what anyone posts about problems after using O&O defrag.. if you have problems its because of something in your install, not the defrag program, period.