Screen Flashing Problem Using Vista

[Guest firehawk44]

Hi All,I think I fixed my screen flashing/flickering problem and wanted to pass it on to those who might be encountering the same problem. I did a search and found several fellow simmers had a similar problem some time ago but no solutions provided. The screen would go black for a few seconds, the "Scenery Loading" window would show up indicating scenery was loaded at 100%, and then I was back to FSX. This would happen almost continuously. Sometimes the screen wouldn't flash for several minutes but whenever I changed a view it would start up again. Eventually I received an error msg stating FSX would close because I have used up all the memory and suggested I get more memory or reduce my FSX display settings. Yikes! I have 4 gigs of memory and an extremely powerful system. I ran the Vista memory diagnostics and found no problems. I defragged. No success. I changed my SLI config to a single GPU (SLI doesn't work in FSX yet so that was a no brainer). Still no success. I tweaked my FSX config as suggested in this and other forums and the problem continued so I changed the config back without any tweaks. I uninstalled FSX and reinstalled. Still no luck. I reduced the display settings as suggested by Microsoft. The screen was still flashing. I checked my memory settings in the Advanced System settings page and saw that my virtual memory (Page File) showed that Vista automatically managed paging file sizes for ALL my drives. That was good I thought but I saw this was different from Windows XP as XP had just a checkmark for "System managed size" or you could make your own settings. I decided to change the setting from automatically managing the page file size on all drives to "system managed size" for just Drive C. Finally, success! FSX runs very smoothly and no more flashing or flickering problems. FSX starts up to the startup screen in less than 10 seconds and the actual flight page in less than a minute. My display settings are nearly maxed out on all sliders. I hope this will help others who may encounter this problem and I hope it works for you too.Best regards,JimY My System: Intel Core2 Extreme Processor X6800 overclocked to 3.5GHz; 4GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz; Serial ATA 2 RAID 0 hard drives; Vista Premium OS 32bit (upgrading to 64bit soon); 2x NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX; Ageia PhysX Processor; Dell 3007WFP Monitor; SoundBlaster X-Fi Sound Card with 5 speakers; 1 KW power supply.