I received an email this morning from PCAviator offering a free trial period of a program "that will increase the performance of your Flight Simulator 2004, MegaScenery, Other Photo-Scenery and Your Windows System in general." The program is called SystemBooster.Has anyone tried this program with FS9? If so, what were your results? They give you a 30 day trial period, but I would rather here from the FS9 community before I try their product.ThanksTom

The results can vary depending on your machine; this is why they offer the 30 day free trial. You don't have to depend on others, you can try it yourself. If it works to your satisfaction, you might consider buying it. If it doesn't do anything for you, you can simply delete it.It does NOT write to the registry so it is 100% safe. The only writing it does is to it's own configuration file.Here is a link to the help file: http://www.systembooster.com/systemboosthelpfile.htmBy the way, to answer your question, it works fine for me :)Bobby

I found FSautostart gave me a very good starting, without the need of anything more..YES INDEED: CONNIE!Johan[A HREF=http://jdserver.no-ip.com]Personal Server[/A]A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION, AND A LITTLE MORE ACTION PLEASE!

I also recommend FS Autostart.However if you would like FREE system efficiency advice post your specs in the hardware forum, what your settings are, and there are probably plenty of people that can help you here for free.The main thing is knowing what changes are occuring on yout system, as there is no pie in the sky solution as it depends on how your system is set up.However if you just want to pay someone that is your choice too.Regards,JoeGrab My FREEWARE Voice recognition Profiles here:[a href=http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=fs2004misc&DLID=58334]Cessna 172 Voice Profile[/a][a href=http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=fs2004misc&DLID=60740]FSD Avanti Voice Profile[/a].You will need the main FREEWARE Flight Assistant program to use it, get it here:[a href=http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=genutils&DLID=39661]Flight Assistant 2.2[/a]

Thanks for your inputs.For a long time now I have been running FSAutostart and I find it to be a must have program for FS9. My system problem is that I recently purchased UT USA and since its installation my FS9 operating system my frame rates have dropped significantly. I am still not experiencing any graphical stuttering, my frame rates, over large cities are between, on average, 18-22 FPS. I have reset my target rate to 25 FPS to aid in file switching.A question I have is that I have 512MB of RAM, when I load FS9 with FSAutostart, I recover approximately 370MB. Is that enought RAM for FS9 and its add ons to function effectively?Thanks againTom

I also got that email this morning. Since I'm always looking for any increase in frame rates, I downloaded and installed it. My computer is a 3.0 GHz Pentium, 2 GB RAM, X800 ATI video, and FS9 has it's own RAID 0 pair of HDD's. I did not see any increase in frame rates, but it may make sense. The amount of disk operations is minimized due to the amount of RAM and this program speeds up a computer by speeding up disk operations.Oh well. Hopefully there will be users out there who do benefit.DanS

>Thanks for your inputs.>>For a long time now I have been running FSAutostart and I find>it to be a must have program for FS9. My system problem is>that I recently purchased UT USA and since its installation my>FS9 operating system my frame rates have dropped>significantly. I am still not experiencing any graphical>stuttering, my frame rates, over large cities are between, on>average, 18-22 FPS. I have reset my target rate to 25 FPS to>aid in file switching.>>A question I have is that I have 512MB of RAM, when I load FS9>with FSAutostart, I recover approximately 370MB. Is that>enought RAM for FS9 and its add ons to function effectively?>>Thanks again>>Tom>> I would consider getting more Ram, before I would purchasing a program to speed up my hard drive access.

>I also got that email this morning. Since I'm always looking>for any increase in frame rates, I downloaded and installed>it. My computer is a 3.0 GHz Pentium, 2 GB RAM, X800 ATI>video, and FS9 has it's own RAID 0 pair of HDD's. I did not>see any increase in frame rates, but it may make sense. The>amount of disk operations is minimized due to the amount of>RAM and this program speeds up a computer by speeding up disk>operations.>>Oh well. Hopefully there will be users out there who do>benefit.>>DanSDan, this is precisely the point I stick on. People, if you want to play this game with all the bells and whistles then make sure that your system has:1) enough RAM; a gig at least, this canNOT be stressed enough2) a GOOD video board3) enough hard drive to have room to grow4) lose that low-end operating system and you'll have a better time.5) enough processor speed to play the way you want to.Note that processor speed comes last. Actually, the processor board and the video board should be matched as to performance. A really ultra video isn't going to work well with a slow-end processor.Now I know that there's gonna be 47,000 people who write in to say their dink system will run FS just fine and "you don't need more than that." Well, if that level satisfies you then far be it from me to burst your bubble. For myself, I've spent quite a few of those bucks (that are very hard to get) to give myself a visual treat and skimping on part of the system ain't in it.

Here are my reccomendations (I just built my computer a few weeks ago and did a whole bunch of research, I tend do do that for anything over 35 bucks lol)1)Ram wise Corsair is top-notch, XMS series is great, A gig should cover you, 2 gigs is typically never used2)Depending on your motherboard, I am guessing you have AGP but luckly you still can get AGP boards, depending on your budget, The top is a X800-X850 XT (I have the X800 XT PCIE, great card)Medium end is a 9800 Pro I dont want to start a flame war but I would avoid Nvidia mostly because when you crank up res and AA,AF it dies, also because it AA's clouds so flying in weather is death to FPS3)I would try and get, or assign a seperate physical HD for FS, that has been shown to help. SATA if your mobo supports it4)Xp home or pro should cover it5)also depends on your current system if you can upgrade and to whatThese are just suggestions that can be changed with your budget or what you do/don't want to do. (btw I remember in another thred something about texture caching, go to I think scenery, edit scenery look around there I dont quite remember)Cheers

<>Oh, come on Joe. You are famous here for your distaste for payware as is your right but gimme a break. Going into the forums on this or any other site will produce a MASSIVE quantity of advice/tips/opinions/tweaks and voo doo...much of which is contradictory.If there is a program that actually boosts performance to a measurable degree and does so without the user having to spend tens of hours poring through tons of forum threads and quite possibly doing more harm than good, then such a program has economic value.If it does nothing and the vendor gives you a 30 day FREE TRIAL, what is the problem with that?I'm not flaming here. You express your opinion with great regularity and I just expressed mine.Regards,Jim

SystemBooster does NOT increase frame rates, and they don't claim it does. They do claim it can decrease load times and decrease blurries as textures can load faster. It was developed originally as a way to decrease blurries in intensive disk access sceneries such as photo scenery. They also say it will work for some and not for others. As there is a free 30 day trial, you can check it yourself. I have not tried it yet but I will.Here is a clarification from thier support forum: http://www.pcaviator.com/megascenery/forum...p?showtopic=965Tony

I'll put my 2 centavos here as that product sounds "interesting"...BUT...Look at my system specs below for example. I am running two SATA 10,000 RPM WD Raptors in a RAID 0 array. Only MSFS and its addons reside on the drive. All of this running under Windows x64 which "theoretically" should give even more throughput by eliminating 32-bit drivers effectively doubling the Windows Kernel's access times to the drive. (although to take full advantage I need 64-bit apps)With all that said. I migrated from a EIDE WD Caviar 120GB 7200RPM drive, which I now use for everything else (OS, appplications, etc). I notice ABSOULTELY NO PALPABLE INCREASE IN MSFS LOADING. With that said, benchmark tests (SISOFT SANDRA) show that my SATA RAID 0 array is hugely faster than my EIDE. But at the end of the day, it doesn't translate noticably to MSFS....why?The 'why' is because MSFS, unlike the majority of first person perspective games, relies HEAVILY on processor power to process the textures whereas the other similar titles rely on GPU power - the faster your GPU the more 3D Marks, the more FPS - not so with MSFS. This can be easily demonstrated by comparing frame rates between my old Radeon 9800XT 256MB and my new Radeon X850XT PE. Upgrading the GPU garnered me maybe 5 fps if that. However, the upgrade from my old P4 2.8Ghz 1GB RAM to my new FX-57 with 1 GB RAM is monumental and has transformed the sim into a fluid experience that I have NEVER experienced in MSFS in 20 years. There is even a noticable difference between my FX-55 and the FX-57 (oc'd) I no longer need applications to shut down background tasks, or tweakers to squeeze frame-rates out of thin air. The CPU simply plows though them all and allows at least 25fps in the densest airports, in overcast, with AI traffic packed at each gate.In MSFS textures from the HD are processed by the CPU before they are displayed on screen and stuff like shading, lighting, etc are handled by the GPU, but at 35,000 feet how much shading and lighting is there to be processed? So you can have blazing fast disk access to the processor bus, and then the bottleneck will be your CPU crunching the numbers before handing it off to your graphics card for more processing and eventual display on your monitor. Who cares if you can get textures to the CPU at the speed of light when your CPU is processing them at the speed of sound?At the end of the day, you can use these utilities, buy more RAM, get faster hard drives, the top of the line GPU, stand on your head and chant NAM-MYOHO-RENGE-KYO one hundred times - while holding lit incense sticks between your buttcheeks. If your main goal is to get more performance out of MSFS then you need to save your sheckels, and order the FASTEST CPU that your money can buy. Anything less, is probably a waste of time because there simply IS no magic "performance" bullet. This is especially true of high end systems that are running flat out as it is.On lower end systems this app may (MAY) help, but I am sceptical that the results will be what many would expect.Okay, sorry, 2 1/2 cents :-lolRegards,Mike T.

Everybody thanks for your inputs. They were excellant.Here is what I am going to do:1. Increase my 512MB of RAM to 1Gig. ($55.00)2. Replace my old Radeon 9000 with 128MB of video memory with a new video with a minimun of 256MB of Video Memory. ($85.00)3. Keep in place my 2.4 Ghz pocessor. ($0)With the above changes, I believe that my processor and 333 Data Bus should be able to support the changes.ThanksTom

>With all that said. I migrated from a EIDE WD Caviar 120GB>7200RPM drive, which I now use for everything else (OS,>appplications, etc). I notice ABSOULTELY NO PALPABLE INCREASE>IN MSFS LOADING.Are you saying that FS loading times too (for example, startup, aircraft loading etc) did not increase with HD change? Wow, that's quite bewildering to me, I would expect faster HD's would made a big change relatively to that :( . Or maybe I misunderstood, and you were meaning only texture loading (and therefore no improvement, i.e., in texture popping-up, etc.)? Thank you for your clarification!Marco

I have tried SystemBooster and find it does just the opposite from advertised. It slowed my FS down and made it very jerky. Will remove this software from my system.Just my experience.