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"Stutters" - Please Define, I Think I Got 'em

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Hi All,I'm running a high powered system with Radeon 9700, and I think I may have what I've seen referred to as "Stutters" in FS2002, particulalry in my VC view. Rather than start a new post and waste people's time, there seems to be some good advice on the issue already, but nobody ever says exactly what they mean by "stutter". Could some people who have had this problem please describe what it looks like, so I know if that's the issue on my machine?Thanks!Best,Joel

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Stutters is such a general term in simming these days.... I'll break out how I define them....1) FS2002 H.D. Access stutters--slight "pauses" in sim performance caused by HD activity. Sometimes unavoidable, such as when FS is loading a new swath of scenery or textures. These can be minimized with a fast hard drive, ample RAM (allowing Windows to cache more freq. used texture and scenery files), and a defragged Hard Drive.2) CPU/Graphics card load stutters or hesitation. FS2000 saw this alot....can be caused by poor code, or an issue with loaded graphics drivers, or a slow cpu. And it can be seen in FS2002. I had terrible FS2002 performance for the first few days, only to find a remnant dll of a long removed driver loaded in memory. I found a ghost "display" entry in the registry which caused the issue.3) Third party app stutters. A third party app, either FS or non-FS related, causing hits on the HD and/or cpu. One common culprit is FSUIPC, when logging is turned on. Other culprits range from spyware, to system tray utilities, to attached USB devices. When I have a USB device that is not in use, as an example, I disconnect it and disable any startup software that it uses. Even some gauges can cause stutters, such as the GPS if the map view is zoomed out, or a poorly coded gauge.-John

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good advice, and well informed there matey,

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>I had terrible FS2002 performance for the first few>days, only to find a remnant dll of a long removed driver>loaded in memory. I found a ghost "display" entry in the>registry which caused the issue.Very interesting, can you please elaborate on how to check if there are remnant dlls? In the latest version of Cacheman 5 I recall there's an option to unload all dlls from RAM (or something like that). Does it have to do with the same remnant dlls that you're talking. Do they trigger some processes that steal performance?Thanks.dirk_schreiber@nm.ru

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I'm afraid it's a bit more complicated than anything cacheman could resolve. First, a bit of history on my system:-It originally started out as an HP 233. The HP had an ATI card, which did not support much in the way of 3d. And upgrading the HP was a major pain....So, I gutted it, pulling the HD, modem, sound card, CD-ROM, and floppy, and plugged them into a homebuilt system. In it, I installed a Voodoo 3--pretty much tops at the time. Later, I installed an Nvidia card and upgraded the cpu. It's still a slow system, but stable as heck. I've gone several months of 12 hr a day+ use, and no freezes or Dr. Watsons. And I throw a lot at it. As an example (and I hate to say it), I have a TV Tuner card, and it is not uncommon for me to listen to the TV while flying FS2002. Surprisingly, the tuner card doesn't degrade FS2002 performance.Anyway, back to your question.... After I first installed FS2002, I noticed it would lock anywhere from 30 seconds to 'bout twenty minutes into flight. I'm a WAN admin, and immediately when I see oddball stuff like this, I think that I've done something to hose my O/S.So, I fired up Sysinfo, and started taking a look at time/datestamps of dll's and VXD's loaded. And what caught my eye? My old ATI drivers from my original HP233 setup! I should have prefaced all of this by saying that I cheated--I upgraded without a reformat, which is really a no-no considering all I did. I was smug enough to assume my profession would help me dig out of whatever quagmire I could get myself into. It almost didn't in this case--I came quite close to reformatting. Short of that, I dug into the registry, and found that there were entries in the display section and in the VXD section for the ATI drivers, although the ATI did not show up in device manager.I manually hacked the registry--something I dare not teach--and saw stability and performance increase. In the case of FS2002, like many I had excessive blurries. Killing the remnant ATI drivers made those an odd event, and never to the extremes some have reported here. Let's face it--who knows what resources those drivers were draining, especially because they were partially loaded.I believe, although I never thought about it until this post, that many people who see problems even after reformats, might have systems with some type of onboard video, in addition to their add-on cards such as the Radeons or Nvidia's. In my case, although the onboard video was gone when I swapped my "guts" out of the HP and into my homebuilt box, I still had the conflict.And I should have had a clue--I had noticed months before that my system would sometimes lock in safe mode--something that just should not happen. The problem vanished once I repaired my registry. My next MB/CPU upgrade--I plan on doing it right, and reformatting. -John

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I found the solution, an interesting USB problem that I'll post in a new post to help others. Thanks!Best,Joel

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Thanks John! Great story, fortunately it's not my case, besides WinXP is basically very stable, and I never upgrade OS, wipe the hd clean first, than install the new one.Dirk.

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