A little while back there was a tip on compressing the FS9 folder. Please forgive for forgetting who posted the tip, BUT THANK YOU NONETHELESS!!!I don't understand why this would work, all sense would tell you the added time needed to uncompress the files would cause a slow down.BUT, last night I completed the folder compression (FS9 folder only, NTFS required), completed a complete partition defragmentation, then went flying. I was STUNNED to see how fast the sim loaded, how very smooth the flying was, even with ALOT of clouds, and my machine aint no super computer at that. And the ground textures fill in so much faster, hardly any fuzzies.In the same conditions before, my flight would be choppy, jerky, unflyable with the weather being what it was. This is amazing, but I don't get it. I was able to crank up some settings, and still get a much better performance overall. Now dont rush to go do this expecting the same result. I doubt this will happen for everyone. But for me it has allowed me to improve my performance not in a very very large way, but it has given me a good performance boost.My PC specs are below:PIII 1ghz512Mb RamGeforce 2 Ultra / Geforce 2 MX (Multi Monitor)Sound Blaster Live! Platinum180 GB HD space (4 HDs)Viewsonic 19inch / Magnavox 17inchThere's more to the system, but those are the main components. I did not install any new drivers or hardware, everything is the same as it was before the compression.Anyone else had similar success with this?

http://www.forefrontgrp.com/jayssigsmall.jpg"There is an art . . . to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss!"

The compression did nothing, the defragmentation that is part of the process did everything.

I tried it last night and I noticed improved results too. Although it took almost two hours to copy my FS9 subdirectory elsewhere (for safety) and compress it. But it was worth it.K7 motherboardAMD 1.44G Athlon512m memory40G h/d

I'm not sure I can agree that the compression did nothing. If it was only the defragging process that gave such results (as you suggest), then it should work with FS2K2 as well. But it doesn't. I've defragged my game machine (I run FS2K2) with no beneficial effects as far as running the sim was concerned. But since I don't run FS09, I guess my opinion isn't all that valid. :-shy-Lindy :-rotor:-wave

That's an interesting observation Jeroen.... Do you care to share some technical expertise to back up that statement? Or do you just like shooting down people's enthusiasm lately--is it a new sport learned from those who frequent "other forums"?I argue that compression may indeed improve COF performance, if the cpu load of the disk I/O is greater than that to load and decompress MSFS data on the systems where improvement is noted. Even with DMA, there's some cpu overhead when it comes to disk I/O. And some hard drives are more efficient than others when it comes to I/O. One way to see this is when you run MSFS and run a large file download in the background. An astute observer might notice a periodic slowdown as data is written to the disk. Another way to test this--do a large scale file search with a text string search. You may very well see MSFS performance suffer while the search is running.Still, that's neither here nor there. FS9 is a new sim. There will be some tips which are left field, some based on dubious data, and some where a fair number of people have seen improved performance. I think from what I've seen, this is one of those tips where a fair number have seen improved performance. For those with the perfect system which requires no tweaking or experimentation--I can only suggest you mind your own business, and quit "raining on others' parades". We envy you, but I'd place my expertise against any here and suggest that some tips may help. In the least, let's hear why you think it doesn't work. I often comment when people come in and say that enabling the scenery cache in MSFS works wonders. But rather than a flippant "It doesn't work", I at least explain what it does and why it's there. -John

>The compression did nothing*:-* hmmm Jeoren .. sounds to me like another GNS530-ADF type statement :-rollMichael J.

Hi,I know it doesn't make sense to compress and uncompress, but all I do know is that is does work. There was a program out several years ago that did the same thing, I think it was made by the same company as winzip, and only worked with Win95. This program did slow down the compressed program as it did it's job.This has been one of the greatest tips I have ever come across.Ed

Hi Ed,> know it doesn't make sense to compress and uncompress, but all I do know is that is does work.:)).Cheers,Gosta.http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky/images/wxrebeta.jpg

>The compression did nothing, the defragmentation that is part>of the process did everything.Just FYI,My drives were already being defragmented before this, everyday using Diskeeper by Executive Software. The Compression caused alot of fragmenting to occur during the process. Thus the need to defragment afterwards.My drives are the special edition 80GB WD Caviar drives with an 8MB cache on them, running on a seperate PCI IDE controller. So I can accomodate the 4 Hard drives, 2 CD-Rs and 1 DVD I have in my rig.So indeed the compression has had something to do with the improvement I have seen. I am doing some research on this as we speak and when I come across something worth explainng I'll bring it up again.

http://www.forefrontgrp.com/jayssigsmall.jpg"There is an art . . . to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss!"

Hi Gosta,Thanks for the explanation.Ed

This is certianly worth a try an i'd like to give it a go. Would someone point me to the directions on how to accomplish this.

Yep. Same here: I compressed the FS9 partition and dumped FSUIPC. Flying through a layer of cumuli can be so much fun.Win XP, P4 1800mh, Geforce sth. 4400 (I think). FS9 at 1600x1200x32, no AA

With the raid configuration statement, you might be on to something here. I run a SATA Raid-0 on two 80Gb IBM drives and I didn't notice a whole lot of improvement after compressing the FS9 folder. According to Sandra 2003, I'm pulling somewhere ~ 80mb/s read. I also noticed that the sim takes considerably longer to start up. I have FS9 on its own NTFS partition (non-dynamic) and use perfectdisk 2000 regularly.ALAsus A7n8x-D / AMD 2700+SiImage 1.0.0.33/4.2.50IBM 120GXp 80Gb x 2 / SATA Raid 0 / 16k1GB DDR333

What OS are you running? If it is Windows XP are you using the NTFS file system?Let me know!!

http://www.forefrontgrp.com/jayssigsmall.jpg"There is an art . . . to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss!"

(no text - you were responding to the above posts regarding RAID 0, so you didn't need my explination!!!)Ooops. :)-Greg