Simviation Forums

Curious... Hopefully someone out there knows the answer. I have an old beast of a computer - a Dell Dimension 2400. Basically, a generic Celeron 2.4GHz, recently upgraded from 256Mb to 1 Gb Ram, and also just added a ATI Radeon 256Mb Video card in an effort to increase performance of FS2004, among other games/programs.

My question is thus:

Would there be ANY advantage to installing MS FS2004 (and any add-on scenery) to a 8Gb USB plug-in flash drive, as opposed to running it off a spinning hard drive? Would this allow faster access to weather detail, scenery files, lighting, etc, etc. Would the frame-rate theoretically improve?  Or is access/read speed of the HD not an issue?!?

I would not expect much improvement, as the bus speed of this old machine is pathetically slow (I think my PCI bus to the video card is a mere 33MHz!! Dunno about my real-life USB throughput), but these little 'keychain' drives are so blinking cheap, I'd pay $20 for a modest performance increase.

Any help with an old dinosaur would be greatly appreciated!

'Greg.

Am not sure but I would think a USB port would be slower than accessing the harddrive. But, as you said, the USB drives are dirt cheap and it might be an interesting experiment.

If you have an old 5400 RPM drive it might be worthwhile to upgrade to a 7200 RPM drive.

Now that you have upgraded to 1 GB of RAM, (2 GB would be better), I think think you will find that the Sim runs from your FAST Ram.
The Hard drive will only come into operation occasionally, for about a second, (you will notice a slight blip in the speed), when entering into a new area, when the new data is being transferred to your RAM, replacing the old data!

Have a peek at the HDD light on your Computer, it should be unlit most of the time if you have sufficient RAM installed... ...!

The rest of your system looks fine to run FS 2004 nicely... ...!

F.... 8-)...!

A USB stick WILL be slower than the HD for accessing. I'd imagine the lag would be pretty awful actually!

I once installed FSX to my external 7200RPM 250GB HD and it lagged pretty bad!

I once installed FSX to my external 7200RPM 250GB HD and it lagged pretty bad!

Well that's cause it's FSX...............

Strange...I installed FS9 to my 400GB external drive...It was connected via a USB cable and I never noticed any lag...The sim was actually running better than my internal drive along with all my add-ons...


Welcome to SimV by the way

I can't figure out why your Hard drive should be running anyway, unless you are seriously short of RAM... ...!

One the Sim has loaded from the Hard Drive, you select all your bits and pieces, eg; aircraft, weather, time of day, and location,
This is then all loaded into your RAM Memory, and runs from there.
The only time the HDD should kick-in is if there is a change in the "things" which you selected, when it will load the NEW data into RAM Memory... ...!

Have a look at the HDD Light while the Sim is running...
Since installing 2.3 GB of RAM in my machine the HDD light rarely comes on...(FS 2004).... ...!

RAM is your friend...Baaaaa!..... ...!

F.... ...!

Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. I guess I've still got a little tweaking to do, playing with the drivers and video settings and wut-not on my new video card, to get everything going smoother.

According to Dell specs, I'm limited to 1 Gb on this machine (512 in each slot) so that's what I got. Apparently, the motherboard won't recognize or make any use of more installed memory than 1 Gb. Dunno about the video card. Those specs also quote a 33 MHz old PCI bus speed, so I don't know if there's any advantage to a 256 Mb RAM video card over a 128 or 64 Mb. Dunno what my computer will actually be able to use productively. Oh, well... it was cheap off e-bay.

Thanks for the input about drive speed. I couldn't find that info, but based on the rest of the unit, I'll bet it spins only marginally faster than a vinyl lp! I'm dealing with an old 40 Gb unit here!!

Like I said, I'll play with settings, locking frame rates, and frame transitions, etc, and ditch the flash idea. Thanks again!!

but based on the rest of the unit, I'll bet it spins only marginally faster than a vinyl lp! I'm dealing with an old 40 Gb unit here!!

I had to laugh at that one. I still have a few old HDDs like that laying around.

I was tidying up some boxes of mine the other day and found a 25MB HD. It still works but is no use these days... heck my old USB stick has 10 times the memory and my new one has about 80 million times as much