I have been using every tweak I can find for CFS3, but still get terrible results. I have a Soyo mobo with a P4 1.6 gig, 512 PC100 RAM, GeForce 3 Ti200 with the latest M$-signed drivers, 20-gig 7200 RPM hard drive, DirectX 9.0, Windows XP, and a 1024 permanent swap file. However, I have to set all my graphics at 1 in order to play the game at all. It does o.k. at high altitudes and over water with minor stutter, but get low over land and it's major stutter time. I can't afford any other upgrades at this time, as I barely escaped a divorce with the current hardware.

Help!!

All possible background apps are disabled; patch is installed; have latest agp drivers and BIOS upgrade; have NOT reconfigured anything in config because am not sure what to change (Ramsa's tweaks made no difference).

Windows XP; and I have turned off shadow effects and the other two settings under the graphics sliders.

Still no difference.

Thanks. I'll try it. Meanwhile, on a brighter note, with all the upgrades I have done in the past few months, CFS2 is a wonder to behold.  As for CFS3, the more I read about video cards, the more I suspect that the Nvidia card could very well be the culprit. Previously, I had a Voodoo 4 4500 (pre-CFS3) and it was beautiful. I thought Nvidia was the company that bought out 3DFX and was supposed to "improve" on the product. Anyway, I am considering selling my Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti200 for what I can get and then investing in an ATI. I'll be able to enjoy it a little while before my wife hires the divorce lawyer.

This helped some, but nothing really dramatic. Thanks very much for the input. Meanwhile, anyone want to buy a slightly used GeForce 3?

Thanks to all of you for the many suggestions. I have just installed an ATI Radeon 9500 Pro (AGP 128 Ram) and it has made a huge difference. However, my BIOS will still only go to 4X even though the manufacturer says my MOBO can handle up to 8X. I'm going to keep checking for a BIOS update. Meanwhile, one other thing that puzzles me: when I installed CFS3 with my Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti200, the game's graphics settings were defaulted to 3 (even though these settings caused bad stutters). When I reinstalled it with my ATI, the default settings were at 2. Whatever! Anyway, I'm now going back to try some of the latest tweaks y'all suggested. Thanks again!!
P.S. I sold my Nvidia through Amazon.com

Hi Poppa_J

Sorry you're having so many problems with CFS3. The only free help that I can recommend is for you to format and clean install XP and then of course CFS3. It's amazing how much a format and clean install of your Operating System can help, not only with CFS3 but with how your whole computer performs. With your computer specs you should be able to flight sim pretty well in CFS3.

Did you just upgrade to XP over an existing OS like 98 or ME? You really need to sweep your hard drive clean and start completely over with a format and clean installation.

If you've never done this before there's an excellent pictoral tutorial on it at:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sg_clean.asp

It's very comprehensive and if you print it out there really isn't any way that you can screw up. I clean install XP Pro every 6 months or so to keep my computer running 100%. After you do it a few times it becomes second nature and each time you get better at it and you then know what you want on your hard drive so you don't have a lot of extra crap on it and you learn more about what setups and tweaks work best for ya. And it gets rid of ALL those tricky worms/trojans and viuses that may be infecting your system. Clean, lean and mean is my motto!

I have my hard drive partitioned into 3 partitions. In this way I have all the stuff I want to keep (storage) on my D and E partitions for easy re-installation leaving my C partition open for easy formatting and clean installing my OS and installing everything else on.

Have you run an up to date anti-virus program lately to make sure that your system is clean? You can get a free one (AVG 6.0) from:

http://www.grisoft.com/html/us_downl.htm

Just make sure you update it after you download it and that you first uninstall any old, outdated anti-virus program that you may have installed on your hard drive from the XP Control Panel/Add Remove Programs

And run the Ad-aware (spyware removal program) from:

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/

Other than that, get a better graphics card like I suggested earlier and consider upgrading your CPU.

Your motherboard is probably a good candidate for upgrading. Check out this link if you think you may be interested. For around $275.00 you should be able to plug a P4_2.6GHz 400MHz processor into your mobo.

http://duhvoodooman.com/powrleap/P4N/P4N_1.htm

That's all I can think of. I hope you find out what your problem is. Like I said earlier, CFS3  runs great on my computer.

Good luck.