Cool game, but I have to wait over 5 minutes to start the mission. When the terrain is generating the game freezez for some minutes (36-40%). Is it normal?

Well, it might be normal for your system, but on my system it only takes approximately one minute to load.In order to begin to attempt determining why it's taking so long to load on your system people would need to know what your System Specifications are. See mine below for an example. You may not need to list them quite as detailed as mine are, but without listing some sort System Specs it can be very hard to get started with trying to determine what might be wrong, if anything.Regards,JimSystem 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 v6.9 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, Norton SystemWorks and Personal Firewall 2006

My system is:CPU P4D-3GHzMB GygabyteRAM 1024MbVideo NVidia 7600GT 256MbWinXP SP2Don't have aniviruses or firewall :)On other games my computer works fine. Graphic performance of MS FSX is good, but this freezing during the mission loading is frustrating. And it looks like system resources are not overloaded during that process - I can easyly switch apps, and harddrive is used rarely in this freeze period. Strange...

I just flew a bit ago and I think my load time was actually less than one minute, but I do have 2 GB's of RAM. Yes, I agree... sounds like something is strange. You only have a measly 1 GB of RAM. LOL, just kidding! That's not measly, but 2 GB for FSX is better. Still, it should not be taking you 5 minutes!I don't really know what to tell you, but perhaps someone else might. I will say you should list what sound card you are using if you can, just in case. And it might be helpful to list your FSX settings, at least the settings on the graphics and scenery tabs. Are you using 1m texture setting? It's also possible to take a screenshot of the settings and post the screenshots on here. Lastly, have you defragged your Hard Drive since installing FSX? The last thing I can think of to say at the moment is you might consider using a utility or two that shows some information about what is going on with various processes on your system, such as Process Explorer and perhaps Filemon. I think those are both freely available from Sysinternals, just Google them.Hopefully someone else will have an idea on why your system is hanging for so long at 36-40% loading.Good luck,Jim

I agree to loading takes appreciably longer in FSX than in FS9. One thing I have done to improve it is uncheck geographical areas in the Scenery Library that I don't fly in. Realize this applies only to Free Flights and not to Missions.

Did you defrag after installation? Craig

I had a wait between 4 and 5 minutes until I saw a thread about defragging my harddrive. I defragged using Ultimate Defrag Beta and saw that 10% of my harddrive was fragmented. In addition, about 99% of the fragmented files consisted of FSX files. After the defrag, I restarted FSX and it now starts up in less than a minute, most of the time around 30 seconds. So defragging will give your startup a big boost!Best regards,Jim

defragged. still 5 minutes to start a mission :(

Hi; Did you try unticking scenery areas you don't use as Craig suggested? Sure did cut my waiting time down.

I tried with no effect :(

It is almost certainly due to your computer having to write much of the data for your flight to the hard disk as virtual memory, needless to say, more RAM will help in that case.But, look at it this way, if you are simulating flying an airliner, set up your flight, and while it loads up go get a coffee (or tea if you are simulating a British Airways flight) and come back when it is loaded. You can pretend you were waiting for the INS gyros to spin up and align :-) that takes bloody ages in real life too.How's that for realism?Happy landings :-)

:) as for me i prefer a bottle of beer when flyingi look at my system resources status - CPU (7%) and RAM(80%) looks fine during this freez. i feel this mystery will stay a misterious :(

I remember I read a post somewhere that stated sth like: if you have ultra high terrain distance in the settings or in cfg the loading time is massive.."[TERRAIN]LOD_RADIUS=4.500000Level of Detail Radius Slider2.500000 = Small3.500000 = Medium4.500000 = LargeThis setting was a popular FS2004 adjustment (although it was under a different name), and users there wereable to bring it up to 8.0 for a more crisp sim experience. I have not tested this in FSX yet.Attempting to set this higher (5.50000) caused my install to lock up during flight loading, at

Real time virus checking could slow you down to. I don't think the memory is a problem. You only use slightly over a gig in FSX, so there isn't much swapping if you have only a meg.I have seen where networking issues can cause significant delays. Any time your computer tries to do something on the network and it is unsuccessful it can block a lot of stuff until it times out. I would make sure that you close down any apps that you don't need running (like all the crap we accumulate in the system tray).I have an Athlon XP 3200+ and it takes 30 seconds to get to the 1st dialog and then after clicking on Fly Now it takes one minute ten seconds to start flying. I haven't turned any scenery off.I just watched the loading with Filemon and during the timeframe of 36-40% it is reading the scenery0101 directory. Maybe you have a bad spot on your hard drive? Bruce