So the other night, I decided on a whim (a silly, silly whim) to upgrade my video drivers. I tend not to mess with these, since I run FSX and that can be rather 'particular' about drivers. As such, I had been running the same set that I installed when I first got my 980ti, last spring.

 

Well.... After uninstalling and cleaning up any traces of the old drivers, I installed the new set. Which went smooth, until last night when I went to fly in X-Plane. I quickly discovered a brand new, major 'clockwork' stutter. Every 28.4 seconds (estimated based on using the lap function on my iPhone timer) there would be a hard pause for about half a second.

 

I spent all of last night and a good portion of today trying to solve this. In doing so, I:

 

- Rolled back to slightly older drivers three times in succession. My old set I had previously installed would no longer now install for some reason.

- Ensured 'Threaded Optimization' was turned off

- Turned off & removed all custom scenery.

- Removed all plugins.

- Removed all custom aircraft.

- Turned all settings to absolute minimum.

 

Nothing was working. No other programs or flight sims were displaying the behavior. It didn't matter what I did - I could make XP look like 1990, and it till had the same stutter, every 28.4 seconds.

 

Anyhow, the rather simple (as in, I wish I'd of done this first, simple) fix turned out to be to delete my Preferences folder within X-Plane. Worked a charm. Stutters gone, and I can now fly XP once again.

 

 

 

Hi, I followed your advice by renaming the preferences folder (we are talking of that inside the Output folder right?).

 

Then I tried to run X-Plane (10.50b6), but after 40 minutes it is still loading resources .....

 

Andrea

What does deleting the preferences do though?

I've heard of this "magical" trick for a long time and even stories about people benefitting from deleting the preferences. I am yet to try this trick myself though, as I've been quite skeptical as to how good it could actually be. It sounds like a good enough trick, I'll have to admit that. What happens with the preferences-folder that can explain all those mysterious issues people sometimes have and people sometimes solve by deleting? 

 

 

What does deleting the preferences do though?

 

It forces XP to rebuild all of your settings. You have to start from scratch - all of your rendering settings, all of your saved preferences in regards to AI, anything regards number of flight models per second, etc, they are all wiped out. Upon restart, X-Plane repopulates that folder with default settings. In essence, it's much like deleting not only your fsx.cfg file, but also all of the other .cfg files: controls, etc.

 

 

 

Hi, I followed your advice by renaming the preferences folder (we are talking of that inside the Output folder right?).
Then I tried to run X-Plane (10.50b6), but after 40 minutes it is still loading resources .....
Andrea

 

I should of specified two things: First, I am running 10.45 (no beta). Second, I should of clarified that I didn't delete the folder, I deleted the contents of the folder. I think that may be an important distinction.

 

 

 

"magical" trick

 

No magic here - I had repeatable, timed hard stutters before, and zero stutters afterward. Also, where I learned this was from trying to troubleshoot a problem I encountered a few weeks back - I had a situation arise where every loaded flight would first start to load my proper aircraft, then it would switch and load the X-15 in the drop situation. In researching that one, I read that a suggested fix was to delete the contents of the preferences folder. I dug into it a bit further, and realized that it looked like the command to load that situation somehow got into my controller assignment file (XAssign bug perhaps?). At the time, I didn't want to do something so drastic as losing all my preferences, so I simply deleted a few that looked like they had something to do with controller assignments.

 

I could of done the same thing (new preference folder contents) by reinstalling. Reinstallation was going to be my next step, so the way I figured, I wasn't about to lose anything from trying. :smile: