Fortunately, it's not me. I have a friend on the other side of the country who just got a new system. So far all the info I have is that it's an HP product using an AMD processor 2.5G (duo?) w/6G ram and Vista Premium64. Video card is NVidia 6200 512 ( yes, it's an old card) and 500G drive
He installed FSX and SP1 and with all settings at the lowest he only gets 1 to 4 FPS in the default Trike flight.
Took over his system remotely and cleaned up some of the garbage, UAC, firewall, malware scanner, disabled some of the services like indexing, etc - pretty much along the lines of Nicks guide but winging it from memory.
He ran a space defrag with O&O. Still getting a slide show.
Last night he installed SP2 and I told him to follow Nicks guide for defragging so we'll see when I connect with him tonight.
He had downloaded the 181.20 driver from NVidia. I'm wondering if an older driver might be better for that card. The earliest Vista64 compat driver on NVidia's site is 175.19.
Tonight I'll uninstall and reinstall new driver using DCPro, which I'm sure he did NOT do.
Prior to switching to the new machine he was running XP on an old 2.4G processor with the same card and he was getting 15 - 20 fps generally. At least for him it was flyable.
Any suggestions on next steps.
Should I have him retrace Nick's guide step by step or just continue from there.
My guess is that there is something I missed that's running in the bg that's really stealing cycles - he should be doing better than 1 to 4 fps.
Thanx!