Has anyone else seen colored dots on their aircraft and scenery, and 'snowy' vertical lines in the screen when calling up sub-panels in their cockpits?Just about a week ago in FS9, I started noticing yellow dots on water scenery when looking outside or in spot view. Now I'm seeing red, green, blue and purple dots on aircraft and scenery that come and go. I also now get multiple thin, vertical snowy lines in part of my screen when I call up sub-panels. Close the panel, they disappear.I've re-installed my drivers, no change. And now I'm seeing it in FS2k2, which started today.I'm also having problems now when closing FS9 or FS2k2. I get black screen for up to 2 minutes, then I can't open any windows in XP without a hang. This goes on for several minutes, then black screen again, then back to normal.Anyone have any suggestions? I've had nothing but problems with this computer for so long I'm about to chuck it and quit simming alltogether.1.6GB P4, 40GB HD, 128MB Ti4200/AGP8X, DirectX 9, 1GB DDRAM, WinXP Home.

I hear ya', but don't get all frustrated and stop simming just because one computer is giving you a headache. :-wink2 It sounds like perhaps your Video card might be going bad? Does anything strange occur outside the sim? Maybe some setting is messed up in the display properties. Any recent installs that might account for this? You will figure it out. Just break for a couple of days. I'm sure someone on here can give you some help on this. :-beerchug Take care,Chris

Is your graphics card overclocked ?Mine is, and I get some minor (speckeling) "small black dots" on some of the aircraft from time to time. Especially the reflective windows.If your video card is overclocked, you might try turning it down a bit.Just another suggestion.Happy Simming!ScottATP/CFII - KCOS, in the real aviation world.

Try a clean install of new drivers. My Ti4200 is sensitive to drivers and antialiasing settings, for instance I can't use 2x aa or my menus are black in FS9. I can use 2xQ, 4x and 4xs with no problems. Also check your mip levels in the sim as they may be set to high.Try the 45.33 drivers from guru3d.com. For my system these drivers are the only ones where all my sims,programs and games etc will work with perfectly. Good Luck!Skully

Guys-Thanks for all the replies in trying to help.Orlaam, it isn't just one computer I've had trouble with. I've had three over the last four years. Each one has never given the kind of performance I've wanted from FS. I guess I feel I shouldn't have to get a doctorate in computer sytems just to get things to run right. I've gotten many hours of enjoyment from my FS/add-ons, but at the cost of MANY more hours of frustrating de-buggng, added costs and tweaking. It's just getting to be not worth it. And I say that as a life-long aviation psychotic (I live, eat, breathe airplanes-real world, instrument-rated pilot).Scottpilot- Thanks for the tip, but I have NO idea what 'overclocked' means. This is my point. Why should I? I SHOULD be able to load it on and fly. I don't want to spend hours and hours fiddling this, tweaking that. I have a pretty generic system, nothing too exotic, so this stuff should work out of the box. But again, not railing at you, and I appreciate the thought.Skully- I looked at guru3d.com, the only 45.33 drivers I found were for some 5900 series cards. Or will that work on the Ti4200? I've just gotten to the point where I have to ask myself, how much time and money am I really willing to devote to this?Thanks again to all.

This is an issue that has been debated long and hard and the conclusion is obvious - if you want to get FS to work to the best of its ablity, then you DO have to be prepared to understand and modify the inner workings of your computer. As an IFR pilot you had to do hours of expensive training to qualify beyond VFR so that you could use the systems and aircraft in a challenging environment. FS is the challenging environment for your computer, is all.Think that if you had more expertise on the inside of your box you might not have the hours of frustrating debugging. The simple fact that you have to ask about drivers suggests there's probably a whole heap of upgrading of drivers and system tweaking required to get your computer up to scratch. You ought to be able to find a specialist locally who can fix things for you. Won't save you money, but the time side of the equation might be eased. Current drivers that give great results on Nvidia cards are the 53.03, the 56.55 and the 56.56's. If you haven't updated to later drivers for your graphics card it's like blaming your Ford for not having the performance of a Ferrari, when you haven't put any fuel in.MS expects you to update graphics card drivers - it says so in the readme.rtf!Allcott

IMO, these are signs of overheating of the GPU (as opposed to memory). Maybe the card's fan is about to give up, or you have your computer in a place which doesn't allow proper ventilation, or there are cables dangling inside the case which restrict the airflow. If you have recently installed a PCI card right next to your Graphics Card, you might have both introduced instability to your system and reduced the airflow to your GPU.Kind regards,