Hi Geofa,Thanks for the 'heads up' on those two utilities. I can report a 3-5 FPS increase too....:-sun1 Best RegardsEddyNorth Wales- UK

>>The memory optimiser worked well for me - an increase of 5>>fps from just one pass. Recommended.>>>There's a great little utility called "Stop SRV" which is a>bat file and stops if not all, then all the unimportant>windows services. It's part of a Battle of Britain2 patch and>works better, I find, than Smart Close. I can send it to>anyone, if that is, it's okay by the Battle of Britain people,>either that or I can upload it, or you could of course>download the patch and open it with a zip utility and just get>it from there.If you uplaod I can give a try!

found this 'cmd' file which stops as many unnecessary services as possible. Rename to stopservices.cmdhttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/163306.txt

I can't get Smartclose to run properly. When I click on the icon, nothing happens. The wizard doesn't appear. When I run it in a command box with parameters like /config and /setting, it works. But not in Windows.I disabled my spyware, still it doesn't run properly. Anybody has any idea?M Tan-------------------------AMD Dual Athlon 4400+ @211 2G XFX Geforce 7900GSViewSonic 21" VX2025WMXP SP2

Hi,I'm wondering how important you all think Anti-virus programs are? I've never consistently used one. I've tried a couple a couple of times for very short periods, but never felt they did anything, and they were more of a pain than they were worth.I've been the victim of one attack about 2 years ago (my son installed Instant Messenger without permission and it appeared after that.) that I was able to successfully clean pretty quickly.The only thing I am worried about is that perhaps people are logging on to my system without my knowledge. But so far no problems that I am aware of.I do occasionally check for spyware with Ad-aware and a couple of other online tools, and use online scanners to scan files I don't trust that I download, but that is very rare.So, anyway, why do you guys use anti-virus software?Thomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)N15802 KASH '73 Piper Cherokee Challenger 180

The memory optimizer is very nice. Thanks.Rather than smart close, I use a MS approved method for doing a clean boot. It shuts down just about evrything and with the process/services tweaking I have done in the past, I am down to about 15 processes.Here is the link:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=331796

>The memory optimizer is very nice. Thanks.>>Rather than smart close, I use a MS approved method for doing>a clean boot. It shuts down just about evrything and with the>process/services tweaking I have done in the past, I am down>to about 15 processes.>>Here is the link:>http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=331796>>Does the MS process really help?

The process does loads only a minimal set of needed functions. However, I saw absolutely no FSX improvement + or -. I believe that in many of these situations where some processes are stopped that although they are shown as running they are really not processing. That is, they are in a table of active processes and await some event to trigger them for what is usually a one-time run sequence. However, if the customer has some "other" things running then one or more may either hog CPU time or memory. They may run under unknown circumstances causing a period of nasty behavior in FSX. Thus these techniques are a very good benefit.The other thing that some processes may do is grab a chunk of memory in anticipation of running at some time. The memory cleaner may, or may not, release that to the pool depending upon the allowed characteristics of the acquisition. Once again, a really clean boot helps.There are other benefits just going through the Microsoft process. I have Real Audio and the Google Toolbar. Both run unneeded routines to report back to the Company. I do not trust them. So this process does allow you to stop things that do no good and may be suspicious.I would stick with the Microsoft process to stop processes. I tried other third party programs and always had unfortunate results, some of which are described by others above. Also, use the TaskManager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) frequently to see what is running and what is using memory. You can sort the list to seperate Microsoft from "your stuff". This tells tou specifically what may be hogging something and allows an informed decision rather than a wholesale process shutdown that may interfere with somthing with a dependancy.Regards,Dick Boley

these two programs are allowing me to play the game , but i do have a question do you have to load the software just before you start the sim or is there a way that it does it automatically.

I found that when I was using FSAutostart, this process killed everything that I had FSAutostart killing. I am sure there may be a few more things that could be killed, but I just turned off everything that I knew was safe with FSAutostart. In addition, I am already running a pretty clean system so there was not much left to shut down. For me, the main use of FSAS was to defrag the memory which the memory optimizer does nicely.BTW, this does kill my antivirus and I have to reboot with a normal start up to get it back. That is fine for me because I am not worried about getting a virus from active sky - the only thing I am accessing on the net during flight.I believe the memory optimizer and the process do the same thing that FSAutostart does but it is a little easier to manage. After all, since you should always start a flight from a fresh boot, it is not much more trouble to start it from a clean boot.