I was enjoying a nice 2 hour flight in my Piper Meridian when my wife called me for supper, and unfortunately the family schedule prevented me from going back to my flight. I was about halfway to my destination when I was interrupted so I hit pause and turned off my monitor thinking I would get back in an hour or so. I finally settled down to resume my flight about 5 hours later. I unpaused the flight and ATC was right there as normal, but I was now flying a slide show with 2 fps! I wasn't even getting a readout of speed or distance on the Garmin 530. I thought it might be a temporary thing for the sim to get back up to speed but no dice. It continued to crawl at 2-3 fps. I had to abort and dump the flight. Is there a known limit to using Pause, and what's the best way to pause a flight for an extended period? Thanks. Tom:-hmmm

Tom,Why couldn't you have just 'Saved' the flight, as normal?Then, you could have resumed it as normal.I don't know if you was flying VFR or using a flight plan and by 'saving' you would lose the plan on the FMC, if the Piper uses one? I don't know.The 'LDS 767' is the only software 'save' that accomodates this, as far as I know.If you was using a loaded flight plan using ATC, all you had to do was to reload it and ask for clearance to your destination. 'ATC' would realize where you are and continue your flight.To answer your pause question, yes, its happened to me too. Perhaps FS-10 will maybe address this or maybe it's a 'CPU' thing eh?Dave T. .........On the lovely warm Devon Riviera and active 'FlightSim User's Group' member at http://www.flightsimgrpuk.free-online.co.uk/

I have used pause for at least 5 hours and not had a problem when I returned. I do not turn off the monitor but I wouldn't expect that to cause any trouble. Try it again, just as a test, and I'll bet that it'll work fine the next time. R-

Tom,I think the slowdown on pause is due to the Garmin Trainer. While flightsim is paused, the 16bit Garmin trainer process slowly but steadily starts to consume more and more CPU resources. When you un-pause flight sim it is starved for resources and just creeps along. At this point your sim session is trashed. I think Garmin 530 behavior is fixed on the newer versions of the Reality XP gauge but the Meridian uses an older custom version that is unique to this particular aircraft. As far as I know there is no fix in the works. Still the Meridian is a great addon and joy to use. I just make sure I don't pause a session when I'm flying. I let otto fly it when I need to be away from the computer.Regards,Jeff

Thanks for the advice guys. I'll try to save a flight and request a new clearance from ATC as suggested. Regards, Tom;-)