The longest day......

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Had a bit of fun with FS2002 yesterday, performing two real time flights, in two different sessions, without having to reboot and without seeing any dropoff in FS performance.My first session was in Flight1's 421.... Flew it to Grand Canyon, then to Vegas, then to Reno, and finally to SFO. Added up to some five hours of flying....After dinner, I fired up FS2002 again, and set up a real time 737 flight. Originally I planned on SFO to JFK, but somewhere over Michigan I decided to divert into KCLE, so I could land before dark. I didn't realize until doing the pattern in KCLE what a treat it is to fly into that airport. Has to provide some of the smoothest performance in FS....I posted some screenshots at the end of that flight yesterday.What I found interesting, is FS remained fluid throughout the day. Some have complained about FS getting stuttery after a long flight. I've never seen it, although I should preface that by saying the terrain "tweaks" I used to have applied to my FS2002.cfg did cause that to happen. I removed them, sacrificing a bit of scenery clarity for a more consistent flight experience. I found that the tweaks caused 40 megs of precious RAM usage--which I don't have to spare on my 256 Meg system.Anyway, for me yesterday summed up the best of FS2002..... Even running it on my Win98 platform, I had rock solid performance and stability. Even running it on a P3/800, I found my approach into KCLE smooth almost to the point of being graceful. I learned long ago that one secret to FS performance on my now low end system was enjoying flight in the 99 pct. of the world which we don't see in the screenshots :)Here's a link to my shots as I approached KCLE:http://forums.avsim.com/dcboard.php?az=sho...id=42497&page=2

[turner112 52]

I bet your passengers were p'd off, eh? Hope you gave them free room and board...Actually, I've left FS running for the scenery for hours on my Dell PIII 500, which is upgraded via Tualatin to a 1.2. I think I have 500 megs of ram... don't remember.Trust me when I say the drive is a total mess; I'm in the process of cleaning it up but it's got all kinds of nonsense on there, including VPN and other specialized stuff so my wife can work from home a few days a week - and FS2002 has always run smoothly. I've never noticed a drop in framerates.I'm actually a tad scared to defragment it because I'm sure it'll screw something up...Just got rid of some spyware today in fact.Andrew

[Guest ba747heavy]

Defragging is a must, you will be suprised how smooth your already smooth sim will become :)For me, virus scanning, defragging and spyware elimination :-8 are weakly chores. I do both at night, after I go to bed that way the computer is never busy when I need it :D

[turner112 52]

In fact I'm defragging right now (I'm posting from my Mac) and have just tossed a whole bunch of stuff in the trash.. cleared off about 3 gigs of stuff.I've unistalled all of my flight sim stuff and will reinstall clean when the drive maintenance is done!Do you have any specific spyware elimination programs? Or do you just poke around?Cheers,Andrew>Defragging is a must, you will be suprised how smooth your>already smooth sim will become :)>>For me, virus scanning, defragging and spyware elimination :-8>are weakly chores. I do both at night, after I go to bed that>way the computer is never busy when I need it :D

[Guest ba747heavy]

I use both Ad Aware 6.0 (www.lavasoft.de) and Spybot Search and Destroy (http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,22262,00.asp)You should reinstall FS after your HDD maintenence, and then defrag again, once you get it all installed. :)