Weird intermitent lag

[HarvesteR]

hello everyone...

something new has come up with FSX these days... it appears that every minute or so, possibly less, the game slows to a crawl (~3-4 FPS)... then it lets go and returns to the usual performance...

it doesn't matter the aircraft or the scenery... it keeps lagging and unlagging intermittently...

i opened the task manager to see what was going on, and found that at these lag peaks, the CPU usage of FSX is at max... then it lets go and returns to normal, only to repeat this phenomena a few seconds later...

i usually get a perfectly acceptable 20-30 FPS, but now these weird lag surges are really making for a bad experience...

what do you guys think this might be?? could it be related to recently installed addons? or possibly to my dirty reinstall of windows i had to perform a while back? (fs was reinstalled after that)

here are my specs:

CPU: Intel Dual-core (pentium D) @ 3.4ghz
Mobo: Asus P5ND2-SE
GPU: Geforce 8800GTX
RAM: 2GB DDR2
OS: Windows XP 32-bit SP2 EN

running FSX SP2, with a Saitek X52 Pro (which should run a plugin with fsx, that is currently not working) and Pro Flight Rudder Pedals

what do you make of this?

Cheers

HarvesteR

[Daube]

I think there might be several origins to such a problem. However, the most common ones I have encountered are the following:
- the indexing service of Windows is still active, you have to disable it
- the antivirus is still active, if it's Avast you can disable it temporarly with just two clicks on the taskbar icon
- the hardrive is not defragmented correctly, and reading the scenery while you're flying is consuming more ressources than usual. You have to defragment and ensure the FSX hardrive is not too full with other files.