Just wondering what some of you folks with more knowledge of this stuff might think of this. I know FS9 doesn't take advantage of multiple cores so I'm thinking it wouldn't be a bad idea to set the affinity (in task manager) to a core other than core 0 - which I assume would be the one mostly controlling the OS. I've got a win7 laptop with an I7 processor so theres a lot of cpu horsepower thats just sitting idle while FS9 is running. I also set the affinity on d3doverider and Fraps to a seperate core other than the one FS9 is set to. It actually does seem to have dramatically improved the smoothness of Fraps vid caps...

I know what I'm about to write goes against the grain, but on my old X2-4800+ PC that I used to have, setting the affinity to all cores for FS9 definitely helped with the smoothness of the application. If I only ran it on a single core, I would get stutters.

In FS I dont see a difference either, but like to know what core the OS is preffering the most..? 0 or 1 ?

About a year or 2 ago, i ran a lot of tests on my computer to figure out if I should limit fs9 to one core and other programs on the other, or just leave it. Before this, I used to always set fs9 to one core. Well after that, I concluded AT BEST, there was no change. At worst, I'd say running fs9 on one core actually made it worse...but logically it doesn't really make much sense so i'd take that with a grain of salt.

Yeah I suspect the limiting of FS9 itself to one core probably doesn't make a whole lot of difference becuase its only going to be using one core regardless so if you have a cpu of a given "stature" that the individual cores are powerful enough to handle it you should be fine. However, I can't help but think that running background apps like fraps and activesky on seperate cores from FS9 would be beneficial...and in that regard I do think I've seen some benefits. I like to cap vid clips while I'm flying using Fraps and I notice now with it on a seperate core that I don't seem to get nearly as many little pauses and stutters while things load when I pan around the VC. In fact, the flight I did this afternoon I saw almost no stutters while capping a video.