1. Make sure you have the latest graphics cards drivers for your card.

http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp  Nvidia
http://mirror.ati.com/support/driver.html  ATi Radeon
http://www.voodoofiles.com/type.asp?cat_id=0  Voodoo 3DFX

2. Make sure you have the latest motherboard chipset drivers

http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/  Intel Chipset
http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=2  Via Chipset
http://download.sis.com/sisdlc/index.jsp  SiS Chipset

3. Make sure you have the latest windows updates...

http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/default.asp Windows updates
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/servicepacks/default.asp  Windows 2000 service pack
http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/pro/downloads/servicepacks/sp1/default.asp Windows XP service pack

4. Some very useful tweak sites for Windows...

http://k6plus.50megs.com/articles/xptweak/ Windows XP tweak guide
http://k6plus.50megs.com/articles/systemtweak/systemtweak1.htm  Windows 95/98/98SEUp_The_Sky tweak guide

5. Graphics card settings...

Right click your desktop and choose 'properties'then 'settings' then 'advanced' now go to the sections called 'OpenGl' and Direct 3D (D3D)' then make sure you have V-sync disabled (if V-sync is enabled it will reduce your frames per second to that of your desktop refresh rate which is not a good thing... disabling V-sync will allow your games to run at their full potential in regards to frames per second)

Stay in the graphics card settings and now make sure that for both OpenGl and D3D that the settings are set to 'performance' and not 'quality' this will help you get more frames per second.

Lastly in the graphics card settings disable Anti-Aliasing... Anti-Aliasing (AA) smoothes out the edges of an image but drastically reduces your gaming performance and games take a frames per second hit with AA enabled.

6. Reboot your computer before any gaming session to free up all the ram that you have installed...

7. Always close background programs before starting a gaming session... you can see what programs are running in the background on your computer simply by pressing control-alt-delete at the same time but do this just once (pressing those keys twice in quick succession will cause your computer to reboot)

You can close every program except for 'Explorer' and 'systray' those 2 are required to be left running but make sure that any Anti-virus software is disabled prior to play as Antivirus software is one of the main causes to poor frames per second and the general running of games.

8. Lastly for now, locate your 'Scheduled Tasks' and set them all to disabled... then click apply.

Also defragment your hard drive regualary, you will be amazed at just how much this can help the running of applications. Dont be tempted to stop the defragment because it seems to be taking forever to complete... its very worthwhile to allow the defrag to complete, set aside a time to do this when you wont be using your computer (whilst you are asleep, out shopping, at school or at work) typically defragment can take anything from 30 minutes upto 3 hours and more in some instances to complete depending on the speed of your computer, the size of the hard drive that is being defraged and how fragmented your hard drive is, please allow for that before you begin to defrag.



I hope this post helps someone gain better performance in both Flight Sims and games on a whole.

Thankyou for reading

Paul.