Finally being frustrated with constant pauses when using complex a/c and realtime weather, I finally upgraded to 1 gigabyte of RAM. I can see from the task manager that now I have plenty of RAM and essentially the paging file is not used.HOWEVER -- I am still suffering short pauses where the sim stops completely for a split second, especially as I am on final to land at a complex airport. It almost seems to me like the terrain settings that I have are not allowing the airport textures to come into view early enough and the sim has to retrieve them from the hardrive when I am too close to the airport, thus interfering with a smooth landing.Currently in my FS9.cfg file I have the following settings [TERRAIN]TERRAIN_ERROR_FACTOR=80.000000TERRAIN_MIN_DEM_AREA=30.000000TERRAIN_MAX_DEM_AREA=100.000000TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=19TERRAIN_TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=8TERRAIN_AUTOGEN_DENSITY=3TERRAIN_USE_GRADIENT_MAP=1TERRAIN_EXTENDED_TEXTURES=1TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=9.500000TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=4.500000TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=3.5Any advuce much appreciated.Barry

Barry, are your pauses occuring because of weather updates? Do you have multiple pauses on all landings, or just some landings, or is it just a single pause? What sort of processor and video card? What is your frame rate when you are noticing these pauses? Is performance always very smooth and with good frame rate until these demanding landings, or is it just when the system is bogged down with complex a/c and weather as you say?Noel

Good questions. Seems either your network connection is slow, causing weather updates to stall FS until it has all the data, your harddrive(s) is/are slow so it stalls while waiting for data to load, or your CPU and or GPU are slow so it stalls while waiting for things to compute.Of course it can also be a combination of those factors.I've changed nothing from the defaults in any config file by hand, it's not needed.If you have a decent system (meaning anything that's not very low end poor quality) sold over the last year to 18 months you should have no trouble running FS2004 at medium to high settings.If you have messed with arcane things like manual editing of cfg files you may have put yourself into that trouble of course, they weren't meant to be edited by hand and many of the "performance tips" found on forums like this one don't work or cause trouble for most or all users.

I think this is "normal" with complex airports... the textures for the terminal buildings need to be loaded from the harddrive and this does take a split second.. I do not know of a way to "pre-fetch" these textures. Maybe if you zoom in from a distance, you can force the textures to load earlier... this is just a guess.. :-)