Like I said, I had the stutters on my old Core 2 system (especially when I used Trackir) but managed to remedy the problem (mostly) through FSX.CFG tweaks. My friend has an older "Q" Core 2 and he has the exact same stutters. I never completely solved my stutters on that Core2 system, though.Yours sounds more like a GPU issue to me, though, as my stutters were never that bad.

I managed to have a flight today - got all the way from Gatwick to 50km of LPMA and then a fatal error occurred.I think I am just going to have to accept that processor on my PC is not powerful enough. My friend has FS2004 with a whole host of addons (on the same rig) full settings and quite frankly it doesn't look that much worse. The general consensus seems to be that (although my computer isn't top notch) FSX is possibly not the most well designed piece of software when it comes to performance? Hopefully Microsoft Flight or X-Plane 10 will be a little better, and someone might buy me a new computer!I really appreciated all the help - it's so irritating that I can have everything on full at 30fps....then it just collapses.Just a final stab in the dark...Here is my work latptop? would this be any better? http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Product/42735/Toshiba-Satellite-Pro-L450D-11K-AMD-Athlon-QL-65

I really appreciated all the help - it's so irritating that I can have everything on full at 30fps....then it just collapses.

Download procmon.exe and run it concurrently with FSX.You should be able to look at the trace and see what happens every 30 sec.Just pause FSX after the "pause" and look at the last few seconds..

Download procmon.exe and run it concurrently with FSX.You should be able to look at the trace and see what happens every 30 sec.Just pause FSX after the "pause" and look at the last few seconds..

Norton Antivirus is quite possibly the wosrst AV solution going if you care about your PC resources. The memory footprint is horrendous not to mention how invasive it is.Get rid ASAP. I would rather have the free MS Security Essentials than Norton. My personal choice is NOD32

Norton Antivirus is quite possibly the wosrst AV solution going if you care about your PC resources. The memory footprint is horrendous not to mention how invasive it is.Get rid ASAP. I would rather have the free MS Security Essentials than Norton. My personal choice is NOD32

Even with auto-protect turned off I have the same issues :(

that system is no slouch. it could be better, yeah, but it should run FSX very well with some compromises.Check your event viewer for the reason of your CTD's and do as Bert advised to find out what's slowing your system every 30 secs. You can also monitor your Task Manager with and without FSX running to see if you can identify an offending process hogging your system resources

Here is the fatal error as viewed in event viewer:+System-Provider[ Name] Application Error-EventID1000[ Qualifiers] 0Level2Task100Keywords0x80000000000000-TimeCreated[ SystemTime] 2011-07-19T17:08:36.000ZEventRecordID107588ChannelApplicationComputerzurichSecurity-EventDatafsx.exe10.0.61472.0475e17d3unknown0.0.0.000000000c00000050000000015a401cc462a32a9e00aAnd around the 30 second freezes we have a lot of Trusteer RapportsvchostnvSCPAPI.exeexplorer.exeand obviously allot of fsx.exe

Probably something with the Nvidia drivers...

Norton Antivirus is quite possibly the wosrst AV solution going if you care about your PC resources. The memory footprint is horrendous not to mention how invasive it is.Get rid ASAP. I would rather have the free MS Security Essentials than Norton. My personal choice is NOD32

I´ve got Kaspersky. Neither problems nor a big frame rate hog at all.

Probably something with the Nvidia drivers...

Hi PFL I thought this may have been the problem - I always have huge amounts of trouble installing the latest nvidia drivers!