Hello everyone...I've not been around for a while but am about to put FS2002 or FS2004 back on my machine. I (still) only have a 1 GHZ processor and 32mb Gforce II card with 384mb ram. Mostly I think I'll use it now for IFR stuff and so I wonder if it wouldn't be better to use FS2002 as I won't be using it for sight seeing. I could load FS2004 and turn the sliders down though if it offers something that I will really benefit from but aren't aware of over 2002 in this area. Thanks for your input.

Personally, until you upgrade your machine, you should probably stick with 2002. You could run 2004 on that machine, but you probably would have to turn the sliders down so far that it wouldn't look all that much better. I would imagine that 384mb of RAM would cause a lot of stuttering. It seems you already have them both, so why don't you just see which one you like better? The things you will be missing in 2004 if you stay with 2002:Better ATCNewer addons Much improved weather engine

FS2k4 is better all the way around than FS2k2. What you'll need to do is get the FSW clouds update. Concidering the type of video card you have FS2k2 might be the better option on a 1gig machine. Without the proper tweaks FS2k4 can bring your system to it's knees in certain situations (and that's on 3gig machines). As you can see I have a decent system and I still have slight issues in certain situations (like with UT in rainy weather conditions trying to land a RFP 747 into London Heathrow).On a 1gig machine I'd almost always say go with FS2k2. Even in IFR conditions your still going to want a fluid flight experience.

As others have noted, your video card is a pretty weak link. CPU speed alone isn't as bad as it sounds--I have a P3/800, and with a few concessions--mostly on screen res and AI--my system is hardly brought to its knees. I'd even go as far as saying that heavy clouds in FS2002 extract the same performance hit as heavy clouds in FS2004. But I've hedged my bets by applying the already mentioned cloud updates, and a few other updates to improve the performance of autogen.Where I think FS2002 is better is with a solid deck--FS2004 doesn't render a solid deck very well even at max settings. I've added a fix of sorts to the file library here, but it causes other problems so it's really only for the ifr enthusiast.If you can tradeout your vid card for something like a 128 meg 4200TI, which is what I have, FS2004 can run well on your system with very little loss of quality. Last week I posted my settings here, and a screenprint...Here's a link to my posthttp://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...&mesg_id=195257Regards

I'd go with FS2004 simply because of better ATC (including non-precision approaches and the intregration with the Garmin GPS). You can get the same performance by turning down the sliders. I have a 733MHz CPU with GeForce4 and it works fine but you can easily get by with your video card.