I found something really interesting yesterday. In the morning, I flew about an hour long FSX flight on my Windows 7 64-bit PC with 6GB of phyiscal Ram. Then I did some work on the PC, played some other games and then returned to fly the return flight on FSX about 5-6 hours later. All this without shutting down the PC for the day. My frame rates on the return flight were very sluggish averaging only 15-17 fps compared to over 30-35 on the first flight. I checked the memory usage in Task Manager and found that FSX was using over 2 GB of physical RAM and over 5 GB of virtual RAM (Paged Pool). I never thought it would get that high and I assume that accounted for the sluggish frame rates on the second flight.Was FSX still holding onto or reserving the virtual RAM from my first flight and didn't release it?

You might try the RAMMap and vmmap utilities from here:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...s/bb545027.aspxMight give you more to go by than just using task manager.scott s..

What kind of work do you do? Seems like your system memory might not have been release from doing something. So FSX paged out.

HiWindows Vista (yuk) and Windows 7 changed the concept on how memory was managed for all programs. In Windows 7 the sytem will attempt to agressively fill the real memory (RAM) just in case. In fact, a program will retain it footprint in memory even if you think you have closed it if windows considers thisprogram heavily used. Vista was a bit too agressive.The advantage of this is that a program that is used a lot will always open very quickly, evenif you open it the first time in a session. In the case of FSX, the memory map is huge and will you agressively fill RAM. The problem you are finding is that if you run other games then these will also agressively fill RAM, and retaindata in RAM when you finish with them. So, it does not matter how big your computer, FSXwill fill the memory - it is meant too, so that the performance and future data loads are readyto go. This is very good for people that run windows-word, windows-excel, powerpoint, autocad andimage software, but does cause issues with games that tend to use large amounts of resourcesand you play many of them. They take a while to unload old data when you start a new program.So you get a hit on performance until the system pages out the old data and pages in the nextgame.the simple answer is to restart the computer before you run FSX and after running otherhigh footprint programs.The problem is you can never please everyone all the time (with an OS), and I am afraid thatthere is a much larger customer base of people who do work than those who play high end games.I am sure you have done this already, but here is the simple guide to getting better performance.http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows...ter-performance

In between my flights, I did have Firefox open from which I do my work. So that shouldn't be an issue. Flying another flight last night on the same route, I saw the memory usage return to normal as 2.2GB of Ram was being used with only a small portion of virtual memory being accessed.I did notice that after starting FSX and loading up a flight, then quitting FSX and restarting it about 30 minutes later, the flight's scenery loads up very quickly as compared to the first time thus showing that FSX was still retaining memory even after quitting it well before.I agree with TomOOO's suggestion of restarting the PC after using FSX or other programs that might be retaining memory. Or else I'm thinking of installing some sort of memory optimizer for Windows 7. Once I find a good one, that is.Thanks for the replies.