For the last week or so, I've noticed that while flying in FS2004, between every 5-10 minutes, my flightsim performance will drop to about 5 or so frames per second. This will last a couple minutes as it slowly improves to being smooth, and then after another 5-10 minutes, it does it all over again. Untill recently, this has never happened before. This phenomena will occur even if I set all my sliders to medium.

My specs are:

AMD Athlon XP 2800+
512 mb of PC2100 ram
GeForce 3 Ti 500 64mb
WinXP pro

I've installed the latest Nvidia Drivers. I've gone through the DirectX diagnostics, and everything's checked out.

I'm getting desperate, any ideas?

Thanks

After restarting my computer, I usually have AVG Antivirus running and my firewall up, and the phenomena still occurs. I don't think those programs would be the problem cuz i've had them for a long time, long before my problem started

Scanning right now

Can spyware really cause performance to drop so much?

I know my system isn't overheating, and I doubt my video card is either. I've got a goodsized heatsink on it, so it should be ok???

Andrew, your post is interesting.
I do not run XP yet, I have the program but did'nt install. A friend of mine reports same trouble. XP connects to internet doing al kind of stuff which slows your game. I want to be in control.
I noticed Your RAM should be PC 2700 for a AMD BARTON 2800, check this out.
Member Congo is one of the experts I believe. Go to hardware for this.
I'm new here, I do not know how to post my specs, but I run Barton 2800+ on aAsus A7N8XX with 533 mb PC2700. Win Me. FS9 wihth enditall.
Lots of stutters with my Gforce 5200, but I do not care so much as I'm mainly flying approaches in poor visibility.
Wish I had a better card though...
Good luck

EA_KATL, tried the software Ad-aware (found 202 items); also installed FSautostart. Conclusion: there is a difference in fps: used to run between 12-15 fps (with a lot of sliders - locked at 25); now, averaging 20 fps.  Will keep on monitoring. 20 fps: good enough for me!

Thanks for the info. Really useful.

JF

Well dont thank me for the tip on FSAutostart i saw it at the botton of Fly2e,post.checked it out for myself and got a boost from it.andrew it dose about the same thing as enditall but its 10 times better.it will even defrag your ram.i am shure Fly2e could probley tell you more details on it.but i have just started useing it myself.but so far it works like a charm.verry verry good program.its a low end system users dream come true.

First, I've been using zonealarm on several systems for a couple of years now and I have not seen any resource problems attributable to it.  If you had some object evidence such as, for example, a task manager display I'd be interested in seeing it.  On my system it sits there using about 1 to 2 Meg of memory, less than 1% cpu and no network bandwidth unless it's checking for a new version.

Andrew.  What a/c were you flying at the time and what maneuvers were you doing?

The reason I ask is that I have an F16 with an insrument panel that will eat 5 to 10 fps just sitting on the runway.  If I hide the panel my fps goes immediately to 20 fps.

I have also seen a lot of frame rate hits near the runway threshold as I transition from flying to taxing.

gw

Well the resource hogging i don't really notice, but i run it when i go on the net.  Any other time i just don't run it, like when i play games.  I set it up not to run at startup, just when i tell it to.