A better 'Pause' mode for MSFS 2020!

Do you find it annoying that hitting the 'Pause' button in MSFS 2020 (and 2024), stops the active flight and returns you to the Utilities menu, but it doesn't pause the GPU from rendering the flight scenery? You hit 'Pause', but your PC fans are probably still running at high speed, and probably still making a lot of noise, and a lot of heat is still pumping out of the computer into your room and wasting a significant amount of electricity. I've just discovered that there's an easy fix for this. You just need to download the 'Sys Internals Suite' from Microsoft. It was created by a team working under Mark Russinovich, who's been making Windows Power Tools since the earliest days of Windows, back in the 1980's I think. Within this suite of applets lives one that's the heart of this post: [pssuspend64.exe]. What is does is simply freeze the CPU's execution of whatever Process ID you point it at; in this case, Flight Simulator. When you freeze the MSFS process, both the CPU and GPU stop processing the game, stop gobbling electric power, and stop generating heat, so your fans can spin down. You implement this tweak via a couple of very simple batch files that you plant on your desktop where they're easy to get at when you want to pause the game so you can work on something else for a while. Here's what you need to do in a step-by-step process.

1. If you don't already have it, download SysInternals Suite from MicroSoft at [https://download.sysinternals.com/files/SysinternalsSuite.zip]. This is freeware. It will come in a ZIP file, extract everything to a folder on your hard disk where you can remember where it is. I suggest a folder called "Utility_Software_Archive" if you don't already have something similar.

2. Once you have unzipped the package into your new folder, look through the content and find [pssuspend64.exe]. Right-click on it and click "Copy as Path" from the Context Menu. Or left-click the file and press [SHIFT-CTRL-C] to load the path into your clipboard. NOTE: If [SHIFT-CTRL-C] does NOT load your file path to the keyboard, and you have an AMD Radeon GPU, the problem is likely the AMD Adrenalin software that supports your GPU. It includes a bunch of gaming features that re-map keyboard shortcuts, many of them standard Windows hotkeys, without warning you that it has done so. If you experience this, and you have Adenalin running (which you likely do if you have a Flight Sim session active), open Adrenalin's main window, and look for the gear icon in the upper left, and click on it. A sub-menu bar will appear at the top of the window: Select 'Hotkeys'. In the upper left ares of the window, you will see 'Use Hotkeys'. If you don't use Adrenalin's gaming add-ons, switch this to 'Disabled', and it will quit interfering with Windows hot keys.

3. So now you should have the path to [pssuspend64.exe] on your clipboard. On your PC's desktop, create two new text files, and rename them [Pause MSFS.bat] and [Resume MSFS.bat].

4. Open the [Pause MSFS.bat] file in whatever text editor you like, and paste this code into the file. IMPORTANT! take note of the line near the bottom where it says "******Paste The Pathname You Stored to PSSupend.exe between these quote marks******", and do exactly that. Save the revised batch file.

@echo off
echo Focusing MSFS 2020 and pressing Escape...

:: PowerShell script to activate the window, send ESC, and minimize it
powershell -NoProfile -Command ^
    "$ws = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell;" ^
    "$p = Get-Process FlightSimulator -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;" ^
    "if ($p) { " ^
    "    $ws.AppActivate($p.Id);" ^
    "    Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 400;" ^
    "    $ws.SendKeys('{ESC}');" ^
    "    Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 400;" ^
    "    $type = Add-Type -MemberDefinition '[DllImport(\"user32.dll\")] public static extern bool ShowWindow(IntPtr hWnd, int nCmdShow);' -Name 'Win32ShowWindow' -Namespace 'Win32' -PassThru;" ^
    "    $type::ShowWindow($p.MainWindowHandle, 2);" ^
    "}"

echo Freezing the process...
"******Paste The Pathname You Stored to PSSupend.exe between these quote marks******" -accepteula FlightSimulator

echo MSFS 2020 is safely paused and minimized.
timeout /t 3 >nul

Now open the [Resume MSFS.bat] file in your text editor and paste this code block into it, again, replacing the pathname with your own where it says to do so, then save the revised file.

@echo off
echo Waking up MSFS 2020...
"******Paste The Pathname You Stored to PSSupend.exe between these quote marks******" -accepteula -r FlightSimulator

echo Restoring simulator window...
:: PowerShell script to find the game window and bring it back up
powershell -NoProfile -Command ^
    "$ws = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell;" ^
    "$p = Get-Process FlightSimulator -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;" ^
    "if ($p) { " ^
    "    $type = Add-Type -MemberDefinition '[DllImport(\"user32.dll\")] public static extern bool ShowWindow(IntPtr hWnd, int nCmdShow);' -Name 'Win32ShowWindow' -Namespace 'Win32' -PassThru;" ^
    "    $type::ShowWindow($p.MainWindowHandle, 9);" ^
    "    Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 200;" ^
    "    $ws.AppActivate($p.Id);" ^
    "}"

echo MSFS 2020 is ready!
timeout /t 3 >nul

Start the Sim and spawn a flight. To see where these scripts really make a difference, spawn over a large city with dense scenery that really makes your GPU work hard. Adjust the desktop layout so that you can see the Simulation main window, the task bar, and the two batch file icons you just created. Open Task Manager, or your GPU's utility software (AMD Adrenalin for Radeon GPU's, GE Force Experience or NVidea App for Nvidea high-end GPU's), and take note of CPU and GPU utilization and power consumption. Now click the [Pause MSFS.bat] icon and hit [Enter]. There will be a 2 to 3 second delay while the script identifies which Process ID is handling MSFS, and then you will see the Sim freeze and minimize to the task bar. Now look at the Task Manager: the CPU and GPU utilization has dropped to zero, and the fans will spin down. Wait a few seconds, then try the [Resume MSFS.bat] icon; the game should pop right back to where it left off.

I've figured out that Asobe can't implement this into the 'Pause' command, because 'Pause' opens up a secondary menu that lets you adjust Commands, Data use, Graphics, and other features, so it can't stop the CPU and GPU or the whole screen would freeze up and you wouldn't be able to use those other features. But if you are pausing the game to work on something completely external to the sim itself, for example manual editing of an airport source XML file in Notepad++, you don't need the sim to be running while you work in the editor, and this hardware pause will let you do those other tasks on the PC without the GPU fans roaring or 300 watts of waste heat pouring out of the computer into your office. Hope this helps some of you!. BTW, I can't take credit for the code itself, just the idea for it: the code was generated by Google AI.