Hi All,Well, I bit the bullet, and ordered a new PC. I would like to solicit any comments on the machine I ordered, and any tweaks anyone has that may be of help for getting FS 2004 to run at top performance. Following are the main specs of the machine, some of the standard items I left off the list, ie CD drives etc.Dell Dimension 8300Pentium 4 2.8Ghz w/800Mhz FSB1GB 400Mhz DDR Memory80GB Hard Drive128Mb DDR ATI Radeon Pro Graphics CardSound Blaster Live 5.1 Sound Card w/Surround Speakers & Subwoofer20.1 inch LCD Flat Panel DisplayWindows XP HomeI am currently running FS 2004 on a P3-1Ghz, with 384Mb memory, an ATI All-in-Wonder card, and although it runs, I do have "stuttering" and I don't have evrything maxed out in FS 2004.So if anyone can comment on how they think FS 2004 will perform with my new PC, and how I should set up FS 2004 for that machine I would appriciate it. :-)Joe

Joe - Much of the answer will depend on the specific model of the video card. If it's a 5200 it's one thing (not good), if it's a 9800 (very good) it's another.Doug

exellent choice, the Radeon 9800pro is a fantastic videocard, and with the new drivers it runs FS9 perfectly.I have a Dell 8300 myself, and i have not for one second been sorry i bought it.With that system you can run FS9 in 1600*1200 32bit with all sliders maxed out, except for the clouds, you need to tweak those sliders a little. The clouds will in some situations bring any system on this planet to its knees.OHN

Hi--I bought a brand new Dell a couple of months ago with almostidentical specs as yours. I had a few problems with FS9 consistently crashing to the desktop after a couple of hours of running. However, I believe that I solved that problem, after consulting both this forum and Microsoft's webpage/knowledge base.Hopefully you'll never encounter any such issues, but my advice is to 1) BE SURE TO DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL DIRECT X 9.0B!!! 2) be sure that the latest drivers for your video card are installed. There are a number of other steps that I took, per Microsoft's knowledge base, that may or may not have had anything to do with the resolution of the problem (adjustments of DirectX settings in "dxdiag," along with others). If you do the first two steps though, you'll probably avoid the FS9 crashing issue, and have a great time with your machine. Overall, you made a great choice. I'm generally very satisfied with my Dell; it has handled any number of intense FS9 situations pretty well (though, as one of the other respondees to your post mentioned, there are the nearly unavoidable stutter issues when you're flying through/in the vicinity of intense TCU clouds when you're looking at other than the front panel in the "cockpit" view--which are only occasional, and are tolerable to me). I use FSMeteo, along with MYTraffic, along with quite a few additional downloaded flight plans and add-on aircraft; up until recently I had my AI traffic set up to near 100% with no problems--the only reason that I turned it down was the all-familiar FS traffic engine "formation approach," and continuous go-arounds syndrome that continues to occur at busier airports.Enjoy your new computer!!

I just upgraded to a Dell XPS 3.2 with the Radeon ATI 9800 pro and 1gb of ram. After a lot of hard work I've got it working really smoothly. All the tweaks recommended here on the forum are quite useful. I highly recommend Chris Willis' clouds. Huge improvement over the default on any computer. I've tried them on a 1.8, a 2.4 and this new one. I recommend using FSUIPCs default settings on visibility which set some parameters on how far you see. These greatly help the computer dealing with dense airports. With a 2.8 you don't need the panelastexture=0 setting as the new computer will load panels marginally faster without that entry.I also subscribe to the tip here on the forum about moving the Autogen HTML out of FS9. This keeps the computer from hanging on to useless detail once you've flown out of an area. This made a huge difference on the 1.8 and the 2.4 machines. I still do it anyway. There are many great tips here in this forum. Just do some searches on frame rates and the like.You'll be very pleased with your new machine.Lee

Thanks for everyone's input. Sorry its been a bit since I have responded, but I have been away from my PC for a couple of days. To Doug, "W2DR", its an ATI 9800 Pro video card, sorry I did not have that clearly stated in my original post. Hopefully will have this new PC sometime next week, just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday to set up and play with!Again, thanks for all of your inputs.Joe

That being the case, all will work quite well and you'll love it. - Doug