System Hardware: PC | MOBO | RAM | CPU | HDD | SSD | PSU etc

Fellow simmers, any words of advise when installing RAM? I know which type to get and how to physically install it onto my motherboard. Are there any 'software' issues I should be aware of? Or will Win XP recognise that new hardware has been fitted and grab me firmly by the hand and lead me through it? Many Thanks, Stan HarveyEmiratesVA

I put together a new computer today with an Aopen AK86-L motherboard and AMD64 300+ CPU. I used my existing Radeon 9500 Pro from my old computer.Everything seemed to go fine, but I am getting some mild artifacts in Flight Simulator 9. They are particularly noticeable when panning the view. The artifacts are like blocks of the image that become displaced or shift slightly, so that things are blurry when moving the viewpoint.This card worked fine on my previous computer.I have downloaded the latest 4-in-1's for my Chipset, Updated DirectX to 9.0b, and downloaded the latest video drivers. I have tried turning down AGP speed from 8 to 4, turning off AGP Texture acceleration, …

Fellow Simmers the world over, I am looking into the buying some 'top-end' hardware and was wondering what the diffenece between the following two cards is: "Asus Radeon 9800 XT/TVD 256Mb Half Life 2 Bundle" & "ATi Radeon 9800Pro 128M OEM" apart from the former costing 150 quid more!!! I've checked out my motherboard and I'll probably go for the following CPU "Intel Pentium 4 Northwood 3.2C Ghz 800Mhz". This should allow my to haul the mail a little quicker I believe from my current P4 2.4Ghz/Geforece4 Ti4200. Although I don't expect the world I'm sure it will give me abit more than the 7.5 fps I get with scenery like HeathrowPro/FlyTampa.. All and any help/thoughts g…

Hi all!I'm in the proccess of upgrading.Choice of CPU is between:P4 2.8 Prescott IMb Cache orP4 3.0 512kb CacheWhich do you guys advice?I was thinking that The 1mb Cache of the prescott will outweigh the slightly slower speed.Any ideas?Thanks allregardsbahri

Hi,I tried to install DDR400 ram into my PC but the BIOS would keep throttling down to 266MHz DDR. I have an 865PERL mainboard and my CPU is a P4 2.2 running with a 400MHz FSB.My question is: Do I need to have an 800MHz FSB to run ram at 400MHz DDR??Thanks for any clarification!James

It seems that a leaked copy of nVidia beta 60.72 drivers has leaked out on Guru3d and a few other sites. I was getting quite slow preformance in FS2004, around 16fps now I'm up to 25 and even 30fps. Not much for a slower system like mine but you never know what higher systems will get. These are with high aircraft, high terrain, low weather, no AA, 4x AS.Of course, like all leaked drivers, these are highly beta. Try them at your own risk. They worked for me but others may have some problems. The driver inf file supports all know nVidia cards. Some people have reported problems with some games but no major ones.You can look around for links on the guru3d forums or link dir…

I am currently looking to upgrade to the latest Intel CPU of 3.4Mhz. My question is that there seems to be two variations on the 3.4. One being the Northwood 3.4 and the other being the newer Prescott 3.4 (still unable to find a store selling them yet). I use my computer mainly for games, specificaly for FS2004. Which one would run FS better, the prescott or the Northwood. My MB supports either. The price difference doen't seem to be that much. Any advice is appreciated.Rob

Anxiously waiting delivery of my new Dell 9100 Notebook which was to be shipped today. I have been checking my account and order status daily (several times)and according to Dell everything was on schedule, and it was ready for boxing and shipment yesterday until......Went through the routine. Pre Production, Production-parts basket-building-and testing. According to Dell's format, all that was left was to box the thing and ship it which normally was within 24 hours unless it was a complex order of some kind (One standard notebook). This fit all projections according to the purchase agreement as a ship date of today, 4/23/04. Got an email from them today as "1st delay" s…

Unfortunately, my movers decided it was a good idea to crack the screen on my 19" NEC Multisync 950+ CRT monitor yesterday... so I am merrily off monitor hunting this week....I have had the NEC for about 3 years and have had no problems, totally loved the unit. Just wondering if anyone can suggest something newer/better that I should check out? I am happy to stick with NEC but I know there are some other excellent monitors out there as well (LG, Viewsonic, Samsung, Sony, etc)...I am not interested in an LCD right now as I want to stay at 19" and the $$$ is too high... any advice is greatly appreciated!(BTW, have been off the forums since last year... I was 'edukator' if a…

Hey guys,I'm having a problem I really never noticed until I installed an aircraft I KNOW is supposed to be ultra shiny. I have an NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420 video card and I've seen the ultra shine displayed before on this card, so I know it's capable, I just don't know why it's not being displayed now as opposed to when it was later. Is there some sort of activation switch for this feature, some slider I don't know about, etc? Any help would be GREATLY appreciated as always. Thanks in advance,Zach Herin

Unfortunately, my movers decided it was a good idea to crack the screen on my 19" NEC Multisync 950+ CRT monitor yesterday... so I am merrily off monitor hunting this week....I have had the NEC for about 3 years and have had no problems, totally loved the unit. Just wondering if anyone can suggest something newer/better that I should check out? I am happy to stick with NEC but I know there are some other excellent monitors out there as well (LG, Viewsonic, Samsung, Sony, etc)...I am not interested in an LCD right now as I want to stay at 19" and the $$$ is too high... any advice is greatly appreciated!(BTW, have been off the forums since last year... I was 'edukator' if…

Hi all!I have never used the NTFS file system before but now I am building a new setup and would like to try it as it is supposed to be much more stable.My thoughts are; will Fs2004 benefit from this and shall I have NTFS on both the operating system drive and on the drive that FS is installed on?Thanks allNot realy hardware problem but almost.Regardsbahri

Hi guysI have a P4 3.06ghz 1 Gb ram, with 2 hard drives (1 80 gig, other 120) and an 64mb ati radeon 9000 video card.I searched the forums for anything on this video card, but alas! no luck.anyway im only getting very low fps in FS9, about 6-10 and is very choppy, ive been playing fs since fs95/98 ish and my settings are pretty medium, nothing too special.... however its just not performing good at all, the plane is always flickering, and half the time i just see the model with partial livery (ie nothing on the tail).i make sure that nothing is running while running flightsim.. i have the latest drivers installed too.is my gfx card to horrible or something, or is somethin…

Hello All,OK, now that we know that WideFS will NOT work on networked computers because it is NOT a stand alone program and use's a .dll . . . I take it my neighbors only other choice is WideView?Will it work on fs2004?and will THAT run FSNav on a seperate monitor (seperate pc) which has an identicial copy of FS on it?And, where can I get this file or what other file or program will work to do what we are attempting?He's really freaking, cause he had this with Win98 and it worked very well for him on just one puter...(three graphics cards in the puter) but he couldn't get 98 to accept his 1Gig of ram.So, he went to XP pro......and of course, has the monitor problem now...…

While AV software is always recommended, I seldom see much said about Norton Internet Security and related products. When I started with my current system, with NIS installed (and using AOL's DSL to connect), I kept getting constant alerts about potential intruders. It was totally distracting, and eventually I had to burrow into the NIS settings and individually disable about 30 "rules" to get the darned alerts to stop (there was still protection, but the software stopped constantly alerting me to potential problems). I found the program not particularly user-friendly, and there have been too many times when I couldn't post to certain forums, or even access them--and t…

Where can I find a simple tutorial for installing a second monitor, capable of viewing FSNav.Current monitor-ViewSonic LCDCurrent video card-Radeon 9800 pro.Thank you, BobBob Dethlefsen490th Bomb.Sqdn 341st BGBurma Bridge Bustershttp://home.pacbell.net/bobeedee/Artist.jpg

The specs:Intel P4 3.2GHzASUS P4C800-E Deluxe mobo1GB Kingston PC3200 DDR400 Ram (2x512MB)ASUS Radeon 9800XT video card w/256MBSoundblaster Audigy 2Plextor PX-708A DVD-R/-RW/+R/+RW driveMitsumi CR-487ETE CD-RW driveMaxtor 80GB 7200rpm P-ATA hard drive (Primary Master)Maxtor 250GB 7200rpm S-ATA hard drive (Quad Master)Whatever brand 1.44MB floppyFSP (don't know the exact brand, but it's FSP something) 350W powersupplyAltec Lansing 251 5.1 surroundsound speakersMicrosoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro joystick (original model)Probably doesn't make a difference in this case, but... Canon S500 Printer-----------------------------This is going to be a long post, but this might…

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Hi, just got my new card the other day and have just had some time to try and install it. I've tried removing the old drivers, to which windows say it needs to restart, do i? won't it restart and auto detect the old card? Anyway, i removed the old card, installed the new card as per the manual, switched on and the system booted for a while, then just after the winXP startup logo, the screen goes blank, and nadda, nothing. Whats wrong? I noticed the there were 3 or 4 lines running up and down the screen (like matrix code). I have now obviously put my old card back and system restored and everything is fine for now.Can anyone shed any light on my problem? Thank you.old card…

Hello,Does someone have experience with this model of monitor?Thanks in advance

This is really REALLY amazing. I just went from 512mb to 1gig of RAM, and it simply made a whole world of difference for me!No more stuttering, FPS are constant always (from 20-35fps, 35locked), I tried even very big airports (FPS drop to 12-15fps, but that's normal), and still have in those cases around 250mb free. No swapping (turned off the swap file) also makes the whole thing faster. And I didn't manage to bring it to the edge of the memory.NO STUTTERING FINAAAAAAAAAAAALLYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!! Smooth as the baby's #### :)Just sharing my happiness...

Hi!I have an annoying problem about my Logitech Freedom 2.4 joystick,which is otherwise excellent.When panning using the hatswitch it moves jerkily and unevenlycausing the image to sort of jump and twitch a little.Panning isn't smooth, that is.I checked all my settings and they seem OK.Does anyone know if this could be fixed?Grateful for help.Thanks!Hans HermanssonSweden

For the first time in 3 years I've seen the infamus Blue screen of death. Ok, so thats 3 years off good news, the bad news is that its happening on the PC I just built. All my drivers, bios paches, updates etc. are up to date and offical, no betas. So far as nothing new has come out withen the past few weeks.CPU temp is never higher than 42c system temp stays right around 35cSo what am I overlooking?AMD64 3200 (I thought I bought a reguler 64, the included paperwork implys that its an FX versionAbitKV8-MAX3PC 3500 ram 1GigMaxtor serial ATA HD 80gigMaxtor idee 60 gigmaxtor idee 20 gig <-- 3 year old bugger Nvidia 5700 (dont ask, couldnt physically get my hands on a 595…

I just got a new raid mother board. It has 4 IDE connectors and two SATA conectors.Does this mean I can have 10 solo HD's if I want."solo" as in, non Raid setup.Or can 10 HD's only happen as a raid set up.

Ive just installed the new nvidia 56.64 drivers for my GeForce4Ti4200 card. They work great in FS2002 but in FS2004 I am getting black boxes around trees, houses, lights and the reg numbers on the default aircraft. How can I get rid of this as the sim is actually running slightly smoother.Thanks in advance,Richard