Upgrade blues...hardware/software issues

[Guest LonelyplanetXO]

Hey all,Seeking a bit of tech advice after hitting problems with a system upgrade. Here's the story so far...I've run FS2002 adequately for 2 years on an AMD athlon 1.4ghz system with a G2pro 64mb card & 512 Mb DDR PC2100 RAM. OS is Win2000 Pro. Fps is around 10-25 depending on addons, with moderate complexity settings. I decided to give the machine a mid-life upgrade in preparation for FS2004.With limited budget, I opted to replace the vid card & add some RAM (the RAM was probably unnecessary, yes, but figured it wouldnt hurt) so purchased a 256Mb Asus Geforce FX5600TD card & 2x 512Mb DDR PC333 RAM chips. I avoided upgrading the CPU as the Athlon2500 has a real clock speed of 1800Mhz, being only a small improvement over the existing chip - which can easily be overclocked to much the same speed. All installed fine, but FPS in flightsim barely changed at all. Worse still, I installed my old card & RAM in my brothers' PIII 2.0Ghz & fps on that shot from 9-15 to 30-50...grrrAfter analysis by a tech friend, he suggested that either the processor or more likely, the Asus A7M266 mobo couldnt transfer data fast enough to the card. So I reluctantly "invested" in an Asus A7V600 Mobo, formatted the drive & reloaded Win2000Pro and Dx9.0b. We also overclocked the chip a tad. The result is that it boots up wayyyy fast & seems to run very quickly indeed. But, once again, no improvement in FS. The system resource monitor shows the chip at 100% with FS running, yet memory usage remains flatlined. I suspect that for some reason, Win2000 is causing the sim to run entirely on the processor & not allocating memory for it. Anyone have suggestions? Ive tried all the obvious things like tinkering with the swap file size, checking the bios settings etc.lonelyplanetXO