Slow loading of menus

[whitley]

I have been busy over the last few weeks tweaking, fiddling and experimenting to get the best compromise between performance and quality out of my Windows 7 and FSX Acceleration. I am reasonably happy with what I have at the moment except for one thing.

Once FSX is running, I get frame rates (depending on traffic, scenery etc) of between 30 and 60. down to around 15 at a busy international airport.

The problem is getting it running in the first place.

When I start FSX the splash screen can take 2-4 minutes before I get the first menu. I click on free flight, that's OK, but when I try to select aircraft, time and season or airport, it can take another 2-4 minutes each. I total it can sometimes take 15-20 minutes before I can even start the engine.

For example If i click on select airport, I have to wait 30- 60 seconds before the drop down menu appears, then after I have elected the airport, the page stops responding for 2-5 minutes. The same thing happens with aircraft and time and season and it is bugging me big time now.

Anyone any ideas what is causing this? It used to load reasonably quickly. I don't have any programs running in the
background. I have added a few aircraft and some scenery, but that shouldn't have that much effect on opening menus, should it?

The hard drive is cleaned of rubbish regularly and defragged, or checked weekly. I have defragged the game and cleaned and defragged the registry. All drivers are up to date. I use a game booster program to close down unnecessary programs before starting FSX,I have tried starting FSX without closing down other programs but it makes no difference.

[F35LightningII]

That is strange. What are your specs?

[whitley]

My Specs are:

FSX Gold +Acceleration
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit sp1
Athlon AMDII x3 440 3000 Mhz processor
4 GB RAM
NVidia Geforce 9600GT 1GB

While it's not a top of the range PC, it is more than adequate for running FSX, indeed it did run FSX OK, but then, all of a sudden, I experienced the hangups mentioned above.

[F35LightningII]

Your specs are better than mine so that can't be the problem.

Maybe you have a virus?

Oh ya, do you defragment your hard drive? If not, that could be a reason for the long waiting times.

[whitley]

Your specs are better than mine so that can't be the problem.

Maybe you have a virus?

Oh ya, do you defragment your hard drive? If not, that could be a reason for the long waiting times.

I did mention in my original plea for help that I defragg, or check the hard drive weekly and that I have defragged the registry and game, none of which has made the slightest bit of difference.

As for viruses, trojans or any sort of malware, I have protection (virus shield and firewall) running all the time and check once a week with my virus checker and with super anti spyware. Occasionaly something is found and corrected, but as far as I know, there is nothing nefarious on my PC and I only have the problem with the menus in FSX.

[EVVFCX]

have you modified the fsx.cfg to take into account how much memory you have?

I'll time mine today to check how long it takes for the first menu to appear after the spash screen, my spec is slightly slower than yours but i use readyboost memory as well which in effect gives you more system memory to play with.

[whitley]

have you modified the fsx.cfg to take into account how much memory you have?

I'll time mine today to check how long it takes for the first menu to appear after the spash screen, my spec is slightly slower than yours but i use readyboost memory as well which in effect gives you more system memory to play with.

I have modified the cfg in one or two places, but nothing to do with memory, that is something I knew nothing about. What entry needs to be altered?

Now can anyone explain this? I installed IE9 last night (I was using IE8) and now FSX starts a lot faster!!!!!! but still not as fast as it used to. I suspect that is pure concincidence, unless there was something overwritten or uninstalled that was causing a problem.

[Steve M]

Assuming you have already cleaned up your cookies and deleted your IE history and such, try unticking scenery that your not going to need for your usual flights. (Say you never fly in some continents, untick it) Just a thought..

Scenery priorities can pay into loading time as I understand it.

[EVVFCX]

Hi Whitley,

This website:
http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

With this forum loaded plus the above one, my fsx took  33 secs to get to the first screen after the splash screen.

was mentioned here on SV for tweaking and tuning fsx to get the best out of it with regards to the fsx.cfg file, it worked fine for me.

regards

Steve.

[whitley]

Assuming you have already cleaned up your cookies and deleted your IE history and such, try unticking scenery that your not going to need for your usual flights. (Say you never fly in some continents, untick it) Just a thought..

Scenery priorities can pay into loading time as I understand it.

I disabled every scenery in the addon scenery folder but it made no difference except that it took even longer to fire up when I re enabled them.

[whitley]

[quote]Hi Whitley,

This website:
http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

With this forum loaded plus the above one, my fsx took

[whitley]

I now have FX starting a lot quicker.  The opening splash screen also took 33 seconds to disappear so I assume that is a fairly normal loading time. The aircraft menu is still slow to load, but I am now assuming that is normal as well.

I presume the original problem was to do with one, or more of the services or programmes running in the background which is now either disabled or stopped.

  Steve, I tried that tweak facility at venetubo. I can't say it has made any difference to loading times, but it has certainly vastly improved the quality of the graphics and slightly improved the performance, so many thanks for the tip.

[EVVFCX]

Hi Whitley,

as a guide, with this forum and this thread open, from the free flight option then choosing the change aircraft it took 6 seconfds for the aircraft thumbnails.

If it runs fine once your in the aircraft then only thing i can think of is severly fragmented section of fsx on your drive or memory not being released after parts have unloaded.

Try running task manager and looking at the performance page, it will show your memory in use increase just after you've logged in then it will reduce, at it's lowest point is when everything needed to run has finished it's initial loading and when the most memory is free for fsx.

With things like game booster you should be able to safely stop prtocesses from running. I'm fairly certain there is a utility on SV that will do this for you but it can conflict with addons.

regards
steve

[whitley]

Hi Steve,
This afternoon the aircraft menu took 18 seconds to open, but later on it took 52 seconds, but I had added one new aeroplane (with just the one variation/texture). I haven't tried it since.

I have a free day tomorrow (Monday) and if my conscience allows it I will sit in front of the PC and tinker.

Thanks for the help

[whitley]

I have tried the FSX cfg and coupled with the frame rate limiter (which I finally found out how to make work) and it has made a tremendous difference to the quality of FSX, especially when flying over photo scenery.

On all but one occasion today FSX has started normally, by which I mean the splash screen lasts for about 30 seconds and the free flight menus drop down immediately, except for the aircraft which takes about 10 seconds.

The one occasion it didn't start I was running the task manager and it hit 98% CPU usage and was running 41 processes, but suddenly that dropped to 39 processes and the CPU usage dropped to 65-74% and  the sim loaded normally.

I just have to identify the two processes that are apparently causing the slow down and then, hopefully, I can enjoy flying again.