I wonder if anyone can shed any light on why my FS9(.1) installation seems to become less and less of a joy to use the longer it sits on my PC. The general performance (and I know this has been noted before by many others) seems to degrade over time - and I am getting a bit fed up of re-installing the whole thing. The programme already has a whole hard disc all to itself, with its very own Windows XP installation, so it is not competing for resources with Norton Anti-virus, or whatver. OK, I have quite a lot of add-ons - third party scenery files, Terrain Mesh, Ultimate Traffic - the usual stuff, but after a fresh re-installation the whole thing seems to work much more smoothly, even with all the same add-ons.Current annoyances include, but are not limited to:1. Performance degradation (e.g. fps, scenery loading times) over long flights. I thought FS9.1 had addressed memory leakage issues??2. ATC and engine sound breaks into rapid fire stuttering for some seconds whenever I change views (cockpit to spot wiew, mostly). This never used to happen - a relatively new niggle.3. I lose anti-aliasing at busy airports. Suddenly my fuselages (sometimes scenery edges too!) look like a hacksaw blade. Reselecting the plane cures this for a while, but it returns with depressing fequency. I've tried various drivers (including Omega drivers) for my Radeon 9800 Pro card to no avail: currently (as generally advised) I have anti-aliasing off in FS9, and on high on the card itself. Switching this around, or having both on, doesn't help.4. 3rd. party aircaraft livery textures (including PMDG) seem to take longer and longer to load - I get blank, whiter planes for several seconds before they fill in fuselage and tail, bit by bit. FS9's own planes, for what they are worth, livery-wise, are OK, but that's cold comfort.5. More frequent 'judders', in which the whole screen freezes for fractions of a second, every few seconds, during panning for instance (though sometimes all on its own, as I sit and watch in spot view).And so on and so forth. I would think that I need more RAM, but I have 1GB already, which hardware tests out as working fine. I always appear to have a minimum of 300MB free RAM when running FS9 in any case. Cutting down the display settings hardly helps at all either. In any case, my frame rates are not low - all the above can occur in spite of averages of 30fps plus.Any advice on this - apart from yet another reinstall???Thanks!Martin

Hi Martin,"The programme already has a whole hard disc all to itself, with its very own Windows XP installation, so it is not competing for resources with Norton Anti-virus, or whatver."Could you explain this better? Also, I'm curious about any "other" XP installs you have on your system.Thanks,Greg

How can you lose anti-aliasing? How is that possible?EDIT: By the way, I have almost the same system as you with the exception of a P4 3.2Ghz and get all the above as well so fear not that you are alone in your misery with FS9.1. I think it has to do with XP SP2 but thats just me.

I have two hard drives and two Windows XP installations - one on each drive. One is for FS9, the other for everything else. There is a boot menu from which I can choose which installation I want to go to. The result is a huge increase in free RAM, over and above installing FS9 into a Windows setup which has MS Office, PaintShop, Norton etc. etc. on it.As to losing the anti-aliasing, it's a mystery to me too!! But it means just that - at busy airports, especially those which are add-ons (and where I expect to take a frame rate drop because of all the eye candy), I can switch from cockpit view back to spot view, and find that my planes (AI included) are now no longer nice and straight-edged, but jagged. Reloading the plane or flight brings the straight edges back, for a while. Once airborne, and the frame rates are back to a healthy norm, this doesn't happen, so there seems to be a reosurce problem. But with plenty of RAM still free, and a big paging file too, I can't see what might be at fault. Martin

I'd look hard at your video and sound drivers. Keep in mind that XP SP2 has an upgrade to DirectX 9.0c embedded within it...lots of older drivers are pretty flakey with 9.0c and need updating. My old nVidia FX5600 had lots of little niggling issues after I installed 9.0c. New drivers were the key to success in my case.No idea how upgrading ATI drivers works, but with nVidia it's not as simple as just running a new install program. You have to uninstall the old drivers, boot into safe mode, and then run a third-party utility to wipe all the remnant files and settings from the registry, before re-booting and loading the new driver. Failure to take these steps can cause instability and performance problems, as parts of the older drivers can remain behind and cause problems.RegardsBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-V L-300Washington, DC

1. Have you defragged recently? I defrag all the time using Diskkeeper. It is great and I love it; would not run a PC without it. Prior to using this utility--which I've now used for 4+ years in one form or another on various PCs at home--I had PC/MSFS performance issues. Defragging daily or every 48 hours helps a lot and it takes just minutes, literally.2. Do the FS-GS process. It has helped me hugely. I don't get 35 fps (my cap is 22 fps), but I do get greater smoothness and virtually no stuttering with heavy settings and lots of UT. I also have 1GB of RAM (Rambus) like you but it didn't seem to suffice. Doing the FS-GS process has helped improve smoothness considerably.3. Turn everything off that you don't need by using FSAutostart. It is an amazing little utility and works wonders. If you don't do FS-GS, get FSautostart; it is superb.4. Your video drivers may be knackered or in conflict with something. Clean them out totally and reinstal the latest drivers for your card.5. Run the DirectX tests and see what happens. Anything malfunctioning or suboptimal?Hope this assists. Happy New Year !JS

JS,What is the FS-GS process?

>JS,>>What is the FS-GS process?+1

No enlightenment as to this FS-GS process... Meanwhile, yes, I defragment regulalry and have tried a number of different drivers. I think that my AMD XP 2800+ CPU must be the bottleneck: a killer CPU might help things...Martin

FS-GS is a system unification service.The guys will talk to you through a voice app, and run you through the unification process, to get your system and hardware working the best that they can.It seems to have worked for many people, but I would say that if you have a reasonable amount of PC knowledge it will all be nothing new, in fact my system performed worse after the process, and I reverted back to my old settings.But, there are many people who do not possess this knowledge, and prefer to have their "hands held".Dan.

Hi Martin:First, thanks for putting in writing what I was too lazy to do myself (for quite some time now). Irritated beyond belief with FS9 silliness.Second, you are absolutely right, no need to bang your head against the monitor. It is happening and it is not your imagination. Every time you fire the FS9.exe it looks just a bit slower and graphics and everything else goes out of wacky (relentlessly but just a bit every time) until we catch up with it or it with us.I think re-installing is a bit too much. Easiest is to delete the FS9.cfg but yes, re-calibrate all the settings again. Working on a little batch but I do not know if it will work yet.I think with all the dynamic actions around MS programs, during run-time changes are being introduced in FS9 that eventually will be stored when we close the program. When we restart FS9, it will load those changes from the last session and will add the new from this one making more of a mess everytime of course.No matter how many tweaks and fixes we introduce, sooner or later the dynamic actions will catch up with them and spoil any improvement.Cheers,MABSorry for not reading your message before.

er, I've been running the sim pretty much since the week of release on my mediocre system. Never had a reason to re-install and haven't noticed any degradation in performance (I've got a ton of add-ons in too). I'm not saying you guys aren't seeing what you're seeing, I'm just saying what you're seeing isn't necessarily an inevitability of the sim...

Although I subscribe to topics, I never get e-mail alerts from this site when replies are posted - don't know why. That explains why I sometimes don't reply for a while (I only see that someone has answered when I manually look up my old posts).So many people report this problem, and bad memory leaks even with 9.1 patch installed that I can't see how I can get to the bottom of the problem. When I last week got an 'out of memory' warning in the middle of a flight and FS9 shut down (doesn't very often get to that stage - and I have hardware checked my DIMM, which seems to be fine) I ranf Microsoft helpline. They were very good, I must say, giving me loads of time, but they couldn't come up with much other than the graphics card may be overheating (not sure??) and that I should try removing 512MB of RAM and running FS9 on the remaining 512MB. Not sure I like that solution either ...Whatever, I am going to buy a 'cutting edge' PC next month, with two NVidia 6800GTs in SLI config, and an AMD 64FX55 CPU. I should get good FS9 results with that setup - some overkill even perhaps!!M.

See now that's just odd. Like I said, I've been running the sim since it came out and I have never gotten an out of memory error of any sort. And that's with first 512mb, and now 768mb of ram. I have heard of people having OOM problems relating to the way scenery is installed in the sim though - something to do with the location of the texture folder for a given scenery iirc...