I've noticed that everytime I look around, my hard drive will get accessedto reload the nearby scenery (like the ships, some buildings, and otheraircraft). scenery takes a second or two to pop in.I have 1.5GB memory and my video card has 256Meg.Why isn't all the nearby scenery just kept in memory?or is all the memory being used by terrain and associated textures?I guess I need a SATA drive.

Hello,I haven't played the demo all that much, but...I don't have a sata drive, just an old school pata, and actually I was amazed at how objects such as ships, buildings, and other aircraft seemed to pop into view nearly instantanenously compared to FS9, and I had very little hd accessing. Scenery loaded pretty smoothly too. Then again, I have 2 GB's of RAM memory, which is recommened as FSX can take advantage of as much as 2 GB of RAM(per statement by tdragger). I should probably state that I haven't tried running the demo with sliders full right. Is that what you're doing?Not all the goodies are in place in the demo from what I have read, it only has a small sample of the textures that will be in the final for example. But it's not completely optimized for performance and probably still has the bloat of debugging code in it too. At any rate, I'm not experiencing what you are with 2GB's of RAM installed.System Specs:Intel P4 3.4C(C = Northwood Core) on Asus P4C800-E Deluxe(Intel 875P + ICH5R Chipset), Zalman 7000a-Cu HS/Fan, Enermax RG651P-VE 550W PSU, 2 GB Mushkin eXtreme Performance(2-2-2) Dual Channel PC3200 RAM, Samsung 214T MultiSync 21" Digital LCD Monitor, Sapphire Radeon X800 XT PE Videocard with Catalyst v6.8 Driver, DirectX 9.0c, Creative Audigy2 Platinum Soundcard with OpenAL Beta Driver v2.08.0002, Western Digital 250 GB w/8 MB Cache 7200 RPM Parallel ATA HDD, WinXP Pro SP2, Nortons Anti-virus and Personal Firewall 2006