Not always true. There really is no way to know what will happen without testing any particular configuration. There are addons out there that will eat performance even though you are halfway around the world. I once did a test by going through my scenery library one at a time and recording the affect on performance. I found, on my rather low end machine, that having fewer items checked in the scenery library will increase performance, and I found a significant performance increase by moving those planes that I rarely fly out of the aircraft directory (I just created a directory called hangar in the aircraft directory and moved the plane directories in there). Granted, I had about 8-10 GB of plane info loaded. It will help further to find unused gauges and move those out, too. I measure performance both by fps and frequency of stuttering. I lock my system at 15 fps (like I said, it's pretty low end. 1.86 GHz Pentium M Dell D810 laptop, 1 GB mem, 64 MB X300 ATI Mobility, 1920 x 1200 display).Finally, I found one scenery that had a 6 fps hit, even though I was flying 300 miles away from the particular airport it covered. And it was a really simple airport. I have no idea what the beef was.The biggest hit that I have found is AI. Turning this off basically kissed my stutters goodbye as best as can be done. With it on, stuttering was almost constant for me, every few minutes, and usually worst when I was on final. I do not use Active Sky. I have just about all my sliders all the way right, and shadows off. I also found heat has a huge affect. I was once getting ready for a demonstration outside, and I mounted my old laptop in a box. All of a sudden I had stutters galore. And I had spent the previous two weeks doing everything I could to get rid of them. And all of a sudden it came back. It occurred to me it's a lot hotter in the box, so I put some ice under it, and the stutters went away.I believe it will also help to analyze your system and find any missing files. Flightsim Manager 2.8.5 is a great tool for fixing up your system. As I am constantly developing and testing sceneries; almost every day, I use it to fix my scenery.cfg file, and it's a great tool for finding missing gauges and sounds and effects, etc..Watch out as you remove planes, since some planes often alias panels and sounds from other planes. FSM will help tease out these issues.Thomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com/FC_StartJava.html] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)

I'm not sure how true this is. The recent HS146 came with 52 liveries. I saw several reports of people running out of memory because, as they were testing it out the first time, were switching through the many liveries available with the plane mid-flight.Point is, while technically you may be correct, there may be leaks out there that are still being discovered. My general credo is, don't be wasteful. If you're not using it, get rid of it, then you can be sure those things won't be causing you any problems.I suppose the key in this situation is, pick a livery and live with it for your flight.I tend to go through my planes and keep 3 or 4 liveries per plane and get rid of the rest. Saves disk space, and really that's all I need. And I just can't believe that FS really cleans up after itself all that well. I'm betting that when you read in the aircraft.cfg, it's keeping stuff it doesn't need.Thomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com/FC_StartJava.html] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)

I don't know how much it affects performance (fps, stuuters, etc) but my scenery.cfg file has 369 entries and my aircraft folder 37.9 gb of 610 aircraft folders (yes I counted them). Some of these have up to 50 liveries in one folder. The guages folder is 1.5 gb and has 7364 files which are guages or cabs. Overall my FS9 folder is 51.4 gb and that is not counting the 36.9 gb of photosceneries on my second hard drive. With all this performance is similar to when It was newly installed but load times are much longer. I timed it from clicking the icon to the aircraft selection menu 1min 49 sec. Switching planes from the cessna 19 sec. These are way longer than default FS9. Ive tried "hangering" the aircraft in another folder on another drive but you can't do that with the AI planes and I like to keep my payware installations intact so have gone back to keeping them all in the aircraft folder and using the "Hangar" as a backup of my whole FS9 folder.

Thanks John.Andrew

>Does anyone have any knowledge as to whether addons such as>scenry etc, decrease the sims performance or does it make>little real difference?>>>Paul.Good question and the answer is a simple "yes!"Not only the registry will be more cramped, but what's more important, some programms are 'contraindicative', so to say, or simply don't stand others. Check out this thread:http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.php?...5a42040be8016c3http://www.fspassengers.com/images/banner/sig/sdc8.jpg