Hi Guy's! I know this has been asked several times before?. And I did a search, but want maybe some fresh answers to a fix? I was flying the LVLD 767-300 from SFO-HNL, with ActiveSkyV weather, and AI Traffic. Now the Take-off from SFO was nice and pretty smooth. I started to decend Into HNL, Which is Pretty Cloudy, And Under the Cloud's On Finals to HNL Intl Rnwy 8L, I got some real bad Stutters! I mean so Bad that I could Not even Fly the Approach by hand! And It made the Plane so Uncontorllable, That I crashed since it was stuttering so BAD! Now I want to know what would Cause this? I Know Clouds are a Big FPS HIT! And I run the Clouds that Came with the Default ActiveSkyV Program. Now is there anything I can do to make the Stutter a little less Violent so I can land My Plane? Really upset me after all that Flying I eneded up Crashing! I Have a Kinda Old System, a DELL 8200 P4, 1.7GHZ,Windows XP w-SP2, 256MB RDRAM, And a So-so Vid Card, a 128MB Ge Force MX4000 Asylum. Now would more Ram help me, uping it to 512MB? Oh, and Everything in the Background was turned OFf except the Firewall since I was Using Activesky5 Online weather. and I have lago HNL Intl! Or is it the Crappy Vid Card I have? Please Any Suggestions would Be Appreciated! Thank's For Listening MIKE:)

If you really want to get away from that, I would suggest possibly upgrading your PC. 256 Ram is just about enough to run windows XP with little left for Flight Sim. That would be the first thing you could try, is getting about a gig of Ram. Limit your cloud layers in ASV to 3 and make sure you have the low res cloud set selected. Use FS Autostart to stop all tasks you don't need. If you have the bucks, a new PC with a 3+ gig processor and PCI express bus with a 256 ram video card would make a world of difference.

Wow, You actually can run FS9 with 256MB? I used to run 521, and noticed a nice improvement moving up to 1gig.You might try turning off AI traffic on approach.Tony=http://www.flightsim-bevs.com]

That's a lot of processing going on for slower-than-average system. I think your best bet is to turn off the AI, turn off the autogen, and fly in clear weather with no clouds at all. The problem you face is really three-fold: the CPU is a little on the slow side, you need at least 512MB of RAM, and the video card isn't going to work well with any kind of cloud cover. If it were me, I'd not spend any money on a single fix as the remaining two problem areas will still be there. I'd either fly it with the options turned down or totally replace the mobo, CPU, RAM, and video card.DougEdited because I can't spel

Thank's for the Advice Guy's! I am kinda on a budget right now, so Can't build a new Machine yet! I will try to add more Ram to 512MB Total, since that is the cheapest option right now! And a Better Vid card after that! I apprecite the tips guy's! If anyone else has something to contribute Please Post! Thank's MIKE:)

I run with a system very close to yours, but with 386MB RAM. My solution is to limit the AI, run with simple clouds, and us FSAutoStart to shut down all un-needed services and programs. I can manage about 20 Frames on final to medium to small airfields. Being that I fly GA (FSD 337, and lovin it) I stay away from the large airports with lots of air traffic.

Don't totally give up. I needed to upgrade my desktop, and I just spent $150 for a new MB, AthlonXP 2500+ and ATI 9800 Pro(SE upgrade) and $100 for 1GB mem. I haven't loaded FS on it yet, but I think it should be somewhat better than what you have now. And for $100 more I could have done a whole lot better. Your best bet is www.pricewatch.com, and if you're lucky, ebay.com (but be careful, I have found it is very hard to get a good deal there compared to what you can spend new if you look around).I am currently using a 1.7 MHz Pentium M (~2 MHz Pentium 4 performance), 1GB mem, 64 MB nVidia 4200 Go graphics Dell D800 laptop that gives very reasonable performance at 1920x1200 resolution, at least as far as I am concerned. To get the system to run well, I have locked it at 16 FPS, turned off AI, all sliders to the right, clouds set to mostly 3D, reduced the texture sizes so I don't have any above 1MB in the FS9/Texture folder. I also have antialias and anisotropic filter hardware controlled and turned off. I removed all but essential scenery and airplanes. I had over 150 airplanes, now I have about 72. Some scenery is not well optimized. I had a KBDL in Windsor Locks, CT freeware scenery installed, and when I turned it off, I gained 3 to 5 fps, and I was flying in Nashua, NH. Pretty significant increase when you are locked at 16. So I went through, turned off all my scenery, and only turn on the scenery I am going to fly over, and tested each of the ones I turned on to make sure they had minimal impact on performance. The scenery I have is still all loaded, I just turned off what I didn't want in the scenery library form. I fly mostly in the NE US. I am using UT USA, FSG LC, FSG Mesh, plus a bunch of other addons. I also configured my Latency on the graphics to 64 and others to 32. I used Flightsim Manager to clean up my scenery and gauge files. And it is very important to defragment your disk. I used O&O defrag and made sure the page file is contiguous. Defrag made a huge difference.After all that, I get a mostly rock steady 16 fps, with only very occasional stutters. I fly almost exclusively low and slow GA, but do occasionally use a heavy. I don't have any payware heavies, though, just Opensky, meljet, Cantu 727 and 737, Lear 25 and a few others.ThomasN15802KASH

Thank's for the other Suggextions Guy's! I Will definately Buy more Ram this Week, and try to get more FPS Freindly Clouds textures. Also Would defragging the HD help my Sim out? I Defrag like every 3-4 months, and it takes so long to Defrag! Like hours! Is it important to Defrag more often for Better FS2004 performance? Thank's MIKE:)

Try getting rid of some of the clutter on your hard-drive, and yes, you need to defrag more regularly than what you do. The more you can delete off your hard-drive, the quicker the defrag process will be, so try and make your hard-drive as 'lean' as possible. Also, try either the 64x64 or the 128x128 ASV clouds....they should help things a little. Limit 'cloud draw distance' to about 40miles...as that can KILL your FPS and cause stutters if you have it set too high. Limit cloud layers to 3 in ASV, with max visibility quite low (say about 40 miles).