First of all I have a killer PC which for the first time is giving me between 40-60 fps with everything maxed out. I noticed today taking off from Ohare that every 3 seconds the game pauses for a brief moment and continuees. I even put the lowest settings on.I recently installed Squawkbox 3. However, I did no have a problem for 1 week. Now all of a sudden I have stuttering video. Any ideas?Here are my system specs.ASUS A8N-SLI PREMIUM3200+ VENICECorsair 1GB Memory XPERT modules 2-2-2-5NVIDIA 7800GTX (single for now)MAXTOR 250GB 16MB cache DIAMONDMAX 10NEC ND-3540A DVD-R DLThermal take water cooling BIG WATERThermal take Armor CasePC Power and Cooling TURBO SLI 510 Watt

Check your disk, it may need defragging. I use a software called 'Diskeeper' which runs continually in the background. It has a six week evaluation period and for

DaveExcellent idea - please advise which version of Diskeeper you use (Home or Professional). Their site doesn't seem to list any differences between the two versions...RegardsToni.

"Professional" offers the option of a "boot time" defrag, which defrags the Master File Table and the paging file... or swap file, or virtual memory (I truly wish Microsoft would stick to ONE name and not invent another one for the same thing every two years or so).I have the Professional version and I'm quite satisfied with the extra options.Be well!Jaap Verduijn.

There are two Defrag software packages I am looking at. One is the DiskKeeper and the other one is the O&O Defrag. Which one is better? Any experiances?By the way basic Microsoft DEFRAGGING solved the problem.

Toni,I am using the 'Home' version and I think it's very very good. Flightsim has been a lot less trouble with it. No more 'CTD's'.Dave T. .........On the lovely warm Devon Riviera and active 'FlightSim User's Group' member at http://www.flightsimgrpuk.free-online.co.uk/

I use O&O defrag for 64bit windows and having been a diskeeper and perfectdisk user I have been converted. Highly recommend O&O

Spy programs running in the background, make mine stutter (momentary pauses). I turn them off for FS2004, and all is fine.L.Adamson

So are you all saying that de-fragging is the answer to stutters?

I would try lowering the Frame rate to around 20 or so. I have an Intel P4 3.2 in a Asus P4 P800se MB and a gig of PC3200 ram using a eVga 5700le AGP w/ 128mgs vid card and am running frames locked at 15 and it's buttery smooth.Yea.... It's nice to say " Hey Man, I'm getting 375 frames a second..." but if it pauses or stutters.... Joe W.

Hi Joe,I have found that too. 15fps is plenty fast enough for smooth frame rate.Trouble, in my opinion, comes when you set it to higher it makes a bigger workload for the CPU. Within flightsim, this is to be avoided.Dave T. .........On the lovely warm Devon Riviera and active 'FlightSim User's Group' member at http://www.flightsimgrpuk.free-online.co.uk/

First thing to check is other programs running in the background..Norton AntiVirus is the most common cause of the symptoms you describe.Defragging is good, but lack thereof does not cause pauses every few seconds...Norton AV does..

This does not make sense. I have shut down everything and defragged again using diskeeper. It worked for several days and now its stuttering and pausing every 3-5 seconds. I have dropped everything down to minimum settings. Still the same problem. Every other game runs well. Any ideas? More ideas?

What do you mean by "dropped down everything to minimum settings"?Is your AV disabled?You might try FS Autostart (in the library, search for Ken Salter) to shut down everything before starting up FS2004..

Check this threadhttp://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...ing_type=search