Well, I gathered my courage. I spent several hours with pre-SP1. tried some of the tweaks to see what effect the had. Really, I could see none. I believe that unless you have sufficient CPU speed you run into limitations deliberately placed in the program or natural conditions where some process simply cannot keep up. As an example, in pre-SP1 any slewing over 160knots, with the Cessna, caused blurred nearby textures. Limiting the frame rates to 20 versus (30fps wide open) helped a very small amount so that some textures recovered.I then installed SP1. Well this time I simply defragged, installed defragged and the visual performance was quite similar to pre-SP1. Flew around and tried Autogen but it is a killer in combination with clouds, traffic, etc. By itself I get 13fps. If I go to an island with lots of water it improves to 16 to 19fps. My California hi-res photo-scenery worked fine. I have 128mb of video memory so I tried a 512mb and 256mb AGP Aperture. No noticeable difference. Need to try smaller settings as well.Right now I have to look at the FSX.CFG to see what tweaks I may have left in there. I was irrationally afraid to even look at it since SP1 was at least equal to the stock FSX.Microsoft did little for some subset of customers and, in fact, hurt the performance of some. Not all those negatively impacted were lo-end systems. The lack of any ability to choose elements of SP1 was a very bad move by Microsoft. Hundreds, if not thousands, of hours have been spent by customers trying to find combinations that work for them. The customers that were satisfied with the stock FSX have, in some instances, been deprived of that performance. This type of patching is extremely bad in one overall respect. The customer who is not computer savvy will be quite reluctant to try all of the arcane adjustments that have been suggested. For that customer category this patch could be a nightmare! That is yet another reason for structuring it into segments that allow the neophyte user to easily see what works and what doesn't.I fear that we will not see anymore material from Microsoft until the DX10 patch. I strongly suggest that they design that patch in a manner that allows the customer to choose the features and functions they want or that their system can tolerate. Regards,Dick BoleyA PC, an LCD, speakers, CH yoke

Hi Dick:Still hoping you might get some measure of greater throughput towards a more satisfactory FSX-SP1 experience, I am curious if you have yet tried the PCI Latency tweak...?Resetting the PCI Latency to 32 for nearly every PCI device on my motherboard PCI data bus was the single greatest performance enhancement I saw on my AGP-based motherboard FS computer system (before I bought my ATI AIW X800XT AGP video card and built my 4-drive RAID 0!).You've probably tried this, but just in case: you are running the "newest OLDER drivers" (NOTE: these may not always be the most current releases on the ATI/AMD support website depending on the Radeon chip in use on your card!) still known to be compatible with the "older Radeon series" GPU chips; you also renamed/relocated your FSX.cfg file so that FSX-SP1 could rebuild it on its first run and thereby re-detect your hardware, then set up a new machine class rated, semi-individualized performance scaling for your FSX.cfg and slider settings?Hope you get some better results soon!:-) GaryGB