I am reinstalling FS9. I have done some things to it over the month that make me want to start fresh. Pain in the butt with all the scenery and aircraft and tweaks I have done. But that's why documentation when you do it is good ;-)My question is regarding compressing the FS9 folder in windows. Is this still considered a performance gain at all? I know a few months back that thread had some life. After a few months of running FS9 I was wondering what people thought of it at this time.I'm doing a monster defrag as we speak... LOLHappy Flying!*EDIT - By the way, what do you suggest for the best look/performance in water textures? A while back it was lyons product, has anything changed?

Well, I wasn't around when the thread you mention was active, but if I had been, I would have contended that any argument that compressing could improve performance is hogwash. The way I've heard the argument is that because texture bitmaps are compressed, they will load faster. I don't believe that. The OS will have to uncompress them on the fly before they can be used. So one is only adding to the system load. Read MS's own documents on file compression. They'll tell you that it extracts a performance penalty.-Basil

Ya, Basil is right it probably doesn't even phase your performance but I compressed just to save on disk space. Haven't had any problems since I did so.Tom

Oh Basil, why were you not around when this gallon of snake oil was originally splashed on the scene!!! LOL :-lol.I totally agree with you, as I stated way back when this was mentioned, its total hogwash, you will NOT see a performance increase by compressing your FS folder, the only thing you will gain is disk space.CheersDan

Great - thanks for the info .. now I just need to take a look at the water textures I asked about. There seem to be about 3 of them including the lyons version.

As with a lot of these tips the best way to find out if there are any gains is just try it - you can easily reverse the process if it causes problems, or no gains. On my system I compress all files on the drive containing games and note a reduction in read time when accessing the files compared to uncompressed format. Menu windows load faster. I can't say there is any performance benefit in the sim, but neither is there any downside. The argument is that the reduction in distance physically travelled by the read/write head on the hard drive to reach the compressed texture is a greater gain than the fractional delay in software decompressing textures. Logic says that the bigger the hard drive, the greater the benefit. Practice says: "Try it and see, YMMV"Many of the textures in FS are compressed anyway.Note: it's a good idea to defrag before and after compressing/uncompressing files.Allcott

Personally, I have found that compression does help. I've noticed less stutters and faster loading times. A couple of other things, but these are pretty serious tweaks that should only be done when reloading Windows itself. 1st, I have a seperate partition on the hard disk just for FS9. The entire partition is compressed. I have it mapped to the Program Files/Microsoft Games directory. That means that Windows XP sees it as C:Program FilesMicrosoft Games but it really is the first partition on the hard drive. Windows XP is installed on the second partition.2nd, when you install Windows XP (or Windows 2000), at one of the very first DOS style start screens, press F2 (I think). You will be presented with a list of computer types. It's been a while and I need to research, but I think you select Standard PC. This turns off Windows XP handling of IRQ's and puts it back to the BIOS. I noticed a BIG increase in Windows XP performance when I did this.Sorry for the long discussion,LTJG H.

As ole Captain Slarty used to say.....Bah! Snake Oil! :-lolhttp://fsgateway.com/frank/fs9paibeta.jpg

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong....On my PIII 1GHZ system running Windows XP Pro with NTFS, compressing the FS9 folder has helped eliminate the stutters for me.Maybe it hasn't worked on your system, but as all the posts on performance always show, the results are different for everyone.So I will stick with the compressed folder.Scott :(