After an hour in the air FS9 shuts down or rather the hard drive just stops. Completely. I have set all the power programmes on the laptop to High performance and all hibernation, sleep or turn off functions to never and it still happens. I also have Webshots but all screens savers are disabled and so on. I don't know what to do next and I can't get on to WIKI to check the FAQ sections and a search brings up nothing so sorry if it had come up before. I am running FS9 with patch under VISTA. Can anyone help?Gerry

It sounds like overheating.Open the case (ground yourself) and clean out the dust from the fans.There usually is quite a bit of dust collected around the CPU be sure to get rid of that, use compressed air but don't point the can down, just straight.If you point it down you can shoot liquid.Let us know how you do.

Overheating in laptops usually results in the whole system restarting. Maybe if just the GPU is overheating it would cause a crash. It's possible that your harddrive is failing also. Let us know if cleaning out the computer solves it.

Overheating in laptops usually results in the whole system restarting. Maybe if just the GPU is overheating it would cause a crash. It's possible that your harddrive is failing also. Let us know if cleaning out the computer solves it.

Thanks,I removed duplicate AFCAD files and eleiminated some start up files but most importantly, as per your suggestions about overheating, cleaned it out, got a cooloing pad and and put that underneath the laptop and hey presto I got through two hours flying without a htich. So despite the fact that it did not feel hot it obviously was over heating.Thanks red1 and radarmanusa for your advice - it has been much appreciated.Gerry