After reading and applying the suggested tweaks posted by JeanLuc in an earlier thread I noticed modest gains in performance. Nothing to write home about. I still experienced frequent pauses and sometimes low graphic quality in both scenery and aircraft textures.The only thing I hadn't tried was adding more memory to my PC as JeanLuc strongly urged. That made all the difference. Scenery quality and graphic quality is perfect and the sim flys smoothly at the hard coded 26fps. I will try to set it lower to see if I can push more of the sliders to the right. I'll try to post my settings here later, but they are pretty much the default settings with a few minor tweaks.Read this quote from JeanLuc:"Something important with FSX as compared to FS9 is to take inaccount now: memory usage. I cannot get FSX to run along withthe business system it is running on without having around1.2GB memory usage. So Windows XP + a couple backgroundapplications + FSX stock aircraft with the settings above =more than 1GB memory."IF YOU HAVE LESS OR EQUAL THAN 1GB MEMORY in your system, youWILL have performance issues because Windows will very oftenswap memory to disk. FS9 was WAY less consuming than FSX, and2GB would be a minimum to run FSX on Windows XP in limitingswapping."Memory is one of the factors FSX uses in its algorithm to determine what level of performance your PC is capable of - as in this article from FSInsider:Striking a BalanceSo, how do we strike that balance? First, we throw your computer into a bucket, figuratively anyway. After you run Setup and launch Flight Simulator for the first time, it runs an algorithm that measures the following:Processor (CPU) Speed (2GHz, 3GHz, etc.) System Memory, or RAM (512MB, 1GB, etc.) Video Memory (the amount of RAM installed on and dedicated to the video card - 128MB, 256MB, etc.) As the algorithm inventories the PC

I did read that article and thought it was one of the better reviews.Coincidentally I had also doubled my RAM to 2 GB and honestly have not seen any great improvement in FSX. Maybe its a background thing.My system is the same as yours except your video card maybe better with 512MB. I have the ATI X700 pro 256MB pci express, and that could be where my problem is. But truthfully there is no way I am going to buy a new card at this stage.Bill

Bill, it may be that your graphics card is your bottleneck at this point. I certainly can understand your reluctance to purchase a new card at this time. My bottleneck was not my video card, it was the memory. I think your case fits perfectly in line with the article from FSInsider.Did you run the MS test on your PC? If so, what were the results?Regards,