I was told that to make FSX really work well one should tranfer all "page" files to an external hard drive and use the highest ram ATI card I could find. This was from someone in Microsofts programming community. Any thoughts? and what is a page file? Scott

>I was told that to make FSX really work well one should>tranfer all "page" files to an external hard drive and use the>highest ram ATI card I could find. >>This was from someone in Microsofts programming community. >>Any thoughts? and what is a page file? >>ScottScott, the page file, is also known as "virtual memory". It's an alloted space on you hard drive, that is used in place of "Random Access Memory" those memory chips that plug into the mother boardIf a program needs more memory to load files than you have, then those files get written to the "page file" on the hard drive.As in FS, if you need 740 megs of ram to run FS and you only have 500 free, then 240 mb is written to the drive. As your flying, for some things, the program will access those files on the hard disc. which takes time. ( thus you have a frame drop, or lag ).To put the page file on a different hard drive, is nothing new. But to be truly worth the effort. that hard drive needs to be on a different IDE than the one your running the flight sim on.Almost all computers have two IDE channels. you can have two hard drives on each IDE. What the Microsoft guys were talking about was put the page file on a hard drive that is on a different IDE than the one your programs are on. The computer can access both IDE drives at the same time without interfering with each other. hence now frame drop or lag.Apologize for the short novelcheers, JimC.

Thank you Jim for responding. If you don't mind, could you explain how I would put that external drive on a different IDE? I run a P4 2.53 gig system with 1gig of Ram and an ATI 9600. I am thinking of going for a better ATI card and I am mostly concerned with getting FS9 running well. I doubt very much that my weak little P4 will run FSX.Thanks again for your assistance. Scott

Scott,You keep refering to external drive. Do you mean a USB or Firewire drive? Putting the page file on those drive reduce the performance of the system since both the USB and Firewire interfaces are much slower than the IDE interface. The better solution is to add a seperate internal drive and put the page file there.

You can't if you only have a single hard drive, no matter how you partition it.How many actual physical hard crives do you have? Putting the page file out on an external drive is pretty pointless as the access times of the external drive may well be slower, not faster. Your best solution, if you're running FS with a heap of addons, is simply to upgrade the card and add another gig of RAM. That should ensure page file activity is kept to a minimum.Allcott

I don't know about moving page files around, but I can definitely vouch for the suggestion of getting a high RAM graphics card. I was originally using a 9800 Pro with 128MB of VRAM and my FSX world was a blurry smear. I figured my problem was I was running out of VRAM due to the rather high dimensions of the terrain bitmaps (1024x1024) so I bought a X1600 Pro with 512MB. My theory definitely paid off, because now I'm flying in a sharp, crisp world.My FPS didn't improve much mind you, but I didn't expect it would. It appears that graphics quality is dependent on the graphics card, whereas performance is CPU dependent. And I only have an Athlon MP 2000+ CPU, so I can honestly say I am thrilled with what I'm seeing on my lowly computer.

Thanks guys.He said external drive and that did bother me since most or all are USB or Fire wire driven. I myself thought this would be slow. I may go and get a better video card and upgrade to 2 megs of ram, or I may invest in a new system. Everything now is getting blurry,,, $400-500 for a new card and ram, or 1500 -2000 on a new system?I may be better off going for the whole new system. Dang this hobby is getting expensive. I wish there was someone who could build me a system specifically for Flight Sim. I don't want or nedd all the other BS that goes with the new computers today. Just a fast processor, good card, lots of memory and a good cooling system. I have looked at Alienware and their prices kinda scare me. # grand for a gaming computer is alot of overtime fire investigations. Hee Hee. anyway.. if it weren't for folks like you guys and this awesome web site I would still not know what notepad is for. ;)Thanks, Scott

The only solid piece of advice we can give you is do NOT buy a new system right now - we are right at the cusp of a new generation of graphics cards supporting DirectX10 but there are no DX10 cards on the market yet, nor any benchmarks about how well these cards handle DX9 games like Flight Sim. Also, DX10 will need Vista, the new Windows Operating System, and that will also change the `balance` of a system - it supports HUGE quantities of RAM compared to XP, and it may be the case that you need a motherboard that allows you to take advantage of that, but whether you will be better off with two graphics cards in SLI mode, or one whopper is still waiting on clarification. Hold off until March, I'd say. by which time the development cycle will be much clearer. Allcott

Thanks SOOO much for the advice Allcott.Gives me time to save some dough and get the most out of FS9 that I have invested so much in. Actually. If i could just get the most out of FS9 I would be happy. It would be something to have all the sliders maxed with Active sky, GE PRO and a variety of outstanding 3rd party aircraft runnig at great FPS, insteasd of chugging along at 10-25 FPS with sliders at the halfway point. Thanks again. Scott.