I'm trying to run CFS1 on a Celeron 600 and it works great..... once it starts - it's just that the load times are unacceptably slow.

Here are the symptom:
Double click CFS icon on desktop.
Wait 2 minutes for movie to start.
Skip the movie (press enter).
Wait 1 minute for menu to load.
Select campaign (menus work great BTW)
Please wait while mission loads - this takes 3 - 5 minutes!
After the mission when I die wait -3 minutes for my eulogy.
Wait another 2-3 minutes to get back to the debriefing.

It seems that switching from 2D to 3D & back is killing me.

I would expect that the game would pretty well rock on this system & it does except for these load times - I spend 20 minutes minimum of "not flying" just to do a single mission.

Here's my system:
Celeron 600
512Meg RAM
Asus 7700 GeForce2 Pro 64 MB video card
Windows ME (and don't harass me about this - it's worked just fine for HalfLife, Warbirds, even an old version of Aces High)

I'm running DirectX 9 and the latest NVidia drivers and all the MS patches.

Here's what I've tried so far, but to no avail:

Shut off everything but Systray & Explorer

Run msconfig & shut off all the background processes.

Defragged the HD.

Added the AGP textures = 0 line to the cfg file.

Added ConservativeSwapFile=1 in system.ini file.

I would love to fly this sim but I'm not willing to twiddle my thumbs 90% of the time I'm playing it.