One word.....TWEAKYou may have all the fancy hardware in the world, but you still need to tweak your system to work optimumly for best performance. Many in the previous posts have mentioned things that NEED to be dealt with so you machine can do it's work. I have an Athlon 2800xp, 512 meg 3200ddr ram, a Nvidia Ti4200 128 mg video card, and enjoy FS at a solid 25fps, silky smooth, with almost all sliders maxed. So, it is not FS being the problem as much as tuning your system so IT can run to it's best. FS is a graphically intense program.....fine tuning is required to run it, no matter what the system. Go forth, tweak-eth, and have fun-eth....you have the system for it!Harry

Thank you all for responding to my frustrated post. I beg your pardon for blowing off steam in this forum. I

Hi Terblanche,"AI traffic like the Flight1 UT has a huge impact on the frames"....sure does, but AI Traffic set at 5% (as it is on my setup) is far better than MS default, especially now that we have the first batch of AFCADs installed. Occasionally I will up the percentage to see what I am missing, but if I want fluidity while taking off and landing at busy airports then I reduce the traffic setting appropriately.It's all a matter of expectations and an acceptance that adding 3rd party stuff to enhance the sim does often have its downside wrt performance. This is something I continually have to remind myself about. We really can't blame MS for this effect. The sim out of the box performs VERY well on quite modest system specs. Sure there are problems but many of the issues you mention are really not that significant for many of us. I can assure you that I have very few complaints and generally the sim's performance is quite acceptable - all depends on where you fly, the position of your sliders, whether or not you have tuned your graphics card for the best balance between imagery and performance and the level of your expectations in any given situation.We should be applauding the fact that MS have provided us with a sim with sufficient inbuilt flexibility to achieve some potentially remarkable results depending on what else we as individuals choose to install beyond the default provision.It would be great, I suppose, if the sim's engine guaranteed fluid performance, under any circumstances, when run with a particular top of the range CPU/GPU/MoBo/Ram/OS combo. Technology dictates that this isn't going to happen for some time yet. All this wonderful hardware and software is continually evolving and as such cannot guarantee perfection across the board. One day, maybe, who knows.Meantime we must all learn to adjust our 'expectation slider' to more realistic levels. Can I respectfully suggest you take a deep breath, calm down and try to look again at this sim with fresh eyes. You should be enjoying the experience, not fighting it.Mike P4 2.4GHz (400FSB), 1Gig PC2100 DDR Crucial, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (Omega 2.4.96c), Hyundai ImageQuest Q17 17" Monitor (1280x1024x32), Gigabyte GA-8IRXP MoBo, Ultra-Quiet PSU 400W, WinXP Home (SP1), DirectX 9.0b