About seven weeks ago I rebuilt with an Asus A8N, AMD DualCore 64 4200+, Asus 7900GTX, and upped to 2GB of DDR and a 550w power supply, keeping the previous 120Gb WD Sata.I was able to slide everything I wanted to the right and was amazed at how much more I was seeing, how much more nuance in terms of texture, colour etc, and how high and consistent the fps were, even with complex payware scenery and 'planes.I have noticed in the last couple of weeks a considerable drop in fps, micro stutters and slow texture-loading (change views and the ground scenery comes up in blocks). It's beginning to look and perform more like my rig of old than the new one.As always I close unwanted progs down and defrag once a week, and have added or removed nothing significant.I know this is like asking "how long is a piece of string?" but is there some obvious reason for this? Is there something specific I should look for?

Adding stuff to it? Fresh install = good performance. Addons = decreased performance.Rob "Holland&Holland" de Vries http://fool.exler.ru/sm/fly2.gif"To go up, pull the stick back. To go down, pull the stick back harder"

Maybe a little detective work is in order...look at the processes tab in task manager for CPU usage by another process.Often when rebuilding Rome, I forget about all the Windows tweaks I made along the way...turning off the indexing service and file read timestamping etc. Could be you have a service running in the background causing some of this.RegardsBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-V L-300Santiago de Chile

Here's a biggy, did you reinstall? or just plug the harddrive in and hope it worked?The latter often results in temporarily better performance before Windows gets confused and starts thinking you have the older hardware installed (I've actually seen it listed in hardware manager before as crazy as that is).I've seen Windows slow down to old CPU speeds a couple weeks after an upgrade. Linux won't do it, Solaris sometimes will, but with Windows XP, it's pretty predictable.The solution is to reinstall everything from scratch, and then go through and tweak Windows and FS.If you did that already, then I can only say, it's possible you have a corrupted file somewhere in either the Windows folder or the FS9 folder, Running Scandisk in Windows will find that.Other than that, more information would be needed to track down the particular problem you're experiencing.-Brian

I would agree with Brian that re-installing XP is essential if you fit a new motherboard.Have you tried re-installing FS, or even just deleting the FS.cgf file (not sure if you only use FS9).Good luck, I'm also looking for a gremlin on my home-built system :). Once you find them all it's certainly worth building your own PC, but getting there can be frustrating at times.Bruce.64*2 4500+ / ASUS A8N32-SLI / Corsair TWINX 1048M 3500LL (2*1 GB) / 7600GT.

I should have said that it was a clean install. I love a clean install - it