I was wondering if there is any way to force FS9 to use more of my system RAM than it currently is? My "problem" happens when I change views frequently... the sim stutters for a bit as it loads in textures for the VC when I change the view inside the cabin, and also when switching from inside to out. I noticed my hard drive light was lit pretty solidly during these stutters, so I figured it would help things if I could force FS to cache more of the textures in memory.I have 2 GB of RAM, and I never see FS9 taking more than about 500 MB or so. I'd really like to put that extra memory to good use... any advice on settings I should tinker with? I've already done the usual capping FPS to a decent setting (24 on my rig) and tweaking the extended texture settings in fs9.ini.Thanks for your help!--Guy

I think we all have those issues, just worse for some of us then others...

Any memory not used by Windows or running programs is automatically used for file cache. Still, the first time the file is called for it will have to load it. Hmmm, if you had enough memory and a program that just read all the textures before fs loads..... ???? It wouldn't have to do anything with the file, just read it all .... a utility?

Use a program called FSAutostart, its here in the library. It will clear up RAM for FS2004. It shutdowns programs that takes up RAM and opens them when you close FS2004. I have 1gig of RAM, when I first start my computer, it says I have 700 mb free when FSautostart closes all the programs etc... I have 820 mb free. Hope it HelpsAlexwww.fs2crew.comhttp://www.fs2crew.com/betateam.jpg

Absolutely, FSAutostart is a must have, especially for those like me getting by on a puny 1.7ghz Dell with 768 megs RAM.I typically have about 550 megs when starting it, and more often than not I can have 650 megs available when starting FS2004. That is on my C: drive. I have an identical separate hardrive ( D: ) with minimal programs, and it is not unusual to see in excess of 670 megs available when starting FS2004. Best utility, at least for me, available!

Tweakguides Tweaking Companion Freeware Edition will work fine.Greg

It's a problem Guy. I have searched far and wide and I think it's just a limitation of the program. One thing I did was decrease my swap file size to 2mb, and this cut down on writing to the drive that has my swap file on it. This will force FS to use more ram than disk space, but this is just a small issue. I think what you are asking is, why not allow for, for example, a larger area of textures to be pre-loaded so that when you arrive there it is already loaded, maximizing use of all that untapped memory. Or this is something I wanted to do: force FS to load ALL .wav files that could possibly be called upon in a particular flight plan, so that there is no slight pause when an actual .wav file loads in realtime for the first time. Couldn't figure out a way to do that. Alas, I don't know how you can force FS to use all of your untapped ram.Reducing the swap file size does slightly address this issue, and I have proven it beyond any doubt, except to a few in this forum.Noel

you could cheat by placing your windows swap file into a ram drive. there are little tools that let you create a virtual drive (like a usual hdd looks in your explorer). you will lose all the content on this drive by restarting your system but the pagefile can be created on startup as well. ive tried that years ago with other games, dunno if it works with fs9 but if i had like 2 or 4 GB ram id give it a try for sure.regards, tom.

Cruachan originally posted this in the "other" Hardware Forum (still can't figure out why there are two?) a couple days ago.Greg

>you could cheat by placing your windows swap file into a ram>drive. there are little tools that let you create a virtual>drive (like a usual hdd looks in your explorer). you will lose>all the content on this drive by restarting your system but>the pagefile can be created on startup as well. ive tried that>years ago with other games, dunno if it works with fs9 but if>i had like 2 or 4 GB ram id give it a try for sure.>>>regards, tom.Hi Tom, I did try this a while back using RamDiskNT if I recall the name, and it did work as advertised. Since moving to 2GB of ram, I have found if I set VM to 2mb, there is clearly less paging to the swap file, and I notice more physical ram is in fact used. I proved this to myself using perfmon.exe, setting up my swap file to a 3rd drive (OS on C, FS on D, swap on E), and noticed there was virtually no write activity to drive E when I set the swap file to 2mb, since you can look at write activity by drive, versus when the page file was set to 1500mb for example on drive E there was regular write activity happening. Seems to me there was some visible improvement in smoothness, however about the only thing that causes the very slight hiccoughs is when FS loads a .wav file not previously loaded, and this swap file maneuver does not affect this slight issue. I hope MS does all the can to optimize performance on machines with copious ram.Noel