I decided to monitor my computer

100% is normal for sure. You may need more physical memory. Going to 2GB helped smooth out my performance.Noel

Just about any game (even those that are 10 years old) will use 100% cpu. most applications will do too but the difference is that it's in stages.. on and off. games are always doing something and will give you total usage. always have been this way

Ah yes, FS is the ultimate cpu hog. It is indeed normal. When I was looking for a new graphics card recently and wanted to special order a BFG 7900 GTX the salesman asked me what games I was going to run that I needed so much horsepower. When I told him Flight simulator he looked at me funny. He said he had it installed once on his year old computer and got like 60 FPS. That I didn't need a 7900GTX for flight sim only for FEAR or Quake or something like that. Of course he had only used the stock planes/scenery with no add ons so he had no idea. I did buy that card and it improved my performance by a wide margin. What I found was that my old Chaintek 6600 was a bottleneck. Well the moral of the story is that FS with addon planes and scenery and sliders to the right is about as demanding on CPU,GPU,memory,etc. as any game out there. Regards, Carlos

>100% is normal for sure. You may need more physical memory. >Going to 2GB helped smooth out my performance.>>NoelActually I ordered another gig on Sunday. It should be here tomorrow. I am eagerly antisipating its arrival. Good to know what I am seeing is not abnormal.

No Tom I dont think it's normal at all if you dont fly a plane or fly a small one. It happens to me for from time to time and obviously comes from a problem I'ven't yet pinpointed with my USB pedals. Disconnecting and reconnecting them would usually bring back CPU use below 10 %. Try to see if one of your USB stuff is not doing it.

I remember this being asked a year ago and after I checked, sure enough I was at 100% CPU usage. I checked the other day with my new rig, using an X2 4800+ dual core and I was surprised to have just 55% - 65% on one core. I get good performance (all maxed locked at 40), but not outstanding, guess I need to check some settings.Regards, MichaelKDFWhttp://www.calvirair.com/mcpics/mcdcvabanner.jpgCalVirAir International

you probably have FS set to pause when you task it out.. of course the cycles won't be used then and you will see random usage numbers.now show us how it (100%) isn't normal, just to entertain this from an abstract angle of computer architecture....

Nope, it was running.Regards, MichaelKDFWhttp://www.calvirair.com/mcpics/mcdcvabanner.jpgCalVirAir International

I found something very similar on my Dell (single core 3.2 Ghz, Windows XP Home).I looked into cpu usage after finding that one of my VB programs was running *much* slower on the Dell compared to the old computer. However, its performance on FS and Far Cry was actually slightly better than the increase in clock speed. When running FS and other games/applications Task Manager typically showed 55% usage (always 100% on the old computer). Someone on a forum suggested that Dell turns down performance to reduce returns. As it turned out, this was not the case. I wrote a VB test program that displayed its running speed. It ran somewhat faster on the Dell as I would expect, although only indicating 50%. This was very puzzling. I also found that changing the priority in Task Manager had no effect. I then ran two or more instances of the test program. The results were far more sensible. With two instances, both instances ran at half speed and showed 50% in Task Manager. With three or four instances the percentage was lower and the indicated speeds quite accurately in line with the percentage. I did notice one odd thing, though. With three instances running the second was on 50% and the other two on 25%. With more instances the second instance always had considerably more priority than the others and consequently ran faster. Not very impressive multi-tasking by Windows! All my measurements can be explained by one theory: that when there is just one application running the percentage figure in Task Manager cannot be relied on. It's not just Task Manager - another utility showed exactly the same. This is probably another peculiarity of Windows multi-tasking. Why my Dell shows 50% while the old computer shows 100%, I've no idea. Therefore, although Task Manager only showed about 50%, in fact FS was getting 100% - which let Dell off the hook! Best regards, Chris

100% CPU usage is never good. I would take a serious look at what is running in Windows (other than the sim).Rob MorrisonFS Enthsiast

It's because of the way CPU useage is reported with hyperthreading enabled. If you turn off HT you'll then get the 100% reading. FS2004 always uses 100% of any CPU and actually runs a bit better on most machines with HT disabled.Doug

What is hyperhtreading and how is it turned on and off? Would it be logincal to conclude I am running with it disabled? Also I have experimented with turning a few things off when I run FS. Steam, Quicktime, and a few other things always start when I start the computer and display in the taskbar next to the time. I would like to have it so some of those things especially quicktime won't automaticly start during the computer startup. I went into the task manager and normally there are about 58 processes running. I have no idea what most of them are but I imagine turning off nonessential ones would help speed things up. My problem is I have no idea what is essential and what isn't

Tom - There is a pretty good explaination of hyperthreading here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthreading . There are two ways to disable hyperthreading - either reformat and reinstall XP or turn it off in the BIOS. Turning it off in BIOS is, by far, far the easier method and, while it doesn't get rid of all the multi-threading bloat, doing so will effectively disable the HT feature. (Most all hardware will let you access the HT setting in BIOS although some manufacturers have "helped you" and disabled that option). As far as the other "stuff" that's running there are a couple of things you can do. To disable things like Quicktime at at startup, click on Start, then click Run, and then type msconfig into the box and press Enter. Next, click on the Startup tab and remove the checkmark from anything you want to not run at startup. For all the Services, etc, that are running go to http://www.kensalter.com/fsautostart/ and download the FSAutostart program. It contains recommendations on what can, and cannot, be disabled and will effectively take care of "all that other stuff".DougEdited 'cause I can't spel

?? What do you mean? Task Manager always reports FS using 100% of the cpu when it is the foreground application.Rhett