The Most Important Flight Simulator X Performance Tip You'll Learn All Year...
FSX is not as slow as people are lead to believe or as people perceive. Unfortunately there is a default setting in FSX that creates the perception of "This program is slow and a drag on PC resources" right from the time you click on the icon to run the product.
Notice from the very time you get the opening screen up in FSX that the hard drive is chugging away resulting in very slow response to your clicking of any options such as loading a different plane or different airport at the startup screen?
That slowness is caused by the hard drive chugging away. Why is that hard drive chugging away? What data is it loading? How do you eliminate this for an immediately responsive FSX?
When you run FSX and you get to the opening screen, FSX proceeds to immediately prefetch data that it thinks you will need for faster loading of your flight when you hit the "Fly Now" button. It is prefetching data such as scenery and if you are running photoscenery you will find that this prefetch process causes an even greater drag. It can take several minutes before your FSX launch will settle down enough so you can even select options at that opening screen. This can take even longer on older slower systems with slower IDE drives.
We're of the opinion that Microsoft made a very bad call when they decided to cause this prefetching as the default option when you launch FSX. It made a lot of people think that FSX is a lot slower than it actually is - especially when it prefetched data it only thought you were going to use.
So can this prefetching be eliminated for a totally still opening screen with immediate response when you select options, load different aircraft, different airports etc..... and once and for all not hear that hard disk chugging away prefetching unneeded data.
Yes it can..... with the DisablePreload=1 option - a line that you can add to your FSX.CFG file and once you add it to your FSX.CFG file, the next time you run FSX, your perceptions of slowness will change forever.
To make this change to FSX....
Note: If you are not computer savvy, you can have a technician or friend who is perform the procedure for you. Please do not call our office for assistance to avoid the potential of our phones being jammed and preventing us from servicing our buying customers.
1. The FSX.CFG file is a hard file to find on your system since it is saved specifically for each user. In Windows XP you will find it in your Documents and Settings folder and in Vista in your Users folder. It is then several folders deep within these main folders. The easiest way to find it is to use the "Search" feature of XP and Vista. Do a search for FSX.CFG (ensure that you have selected "hidden files".)
2. When FSX.CFG is found - Right Click on the File and Select Open With - then open it up with Notepad.
3. Scroll down to the section that says [STARTUP]
4. Under Startup enter the line: DisablePreload=1 so this section should then look something like this:
[STARTUP]
DisablePreload=1
DEMO=0
SHOW_OPENING_SCREEN=1
5. Save the file.
6. Then run FSX and you will see the world of difference in the performance of FSX at the opening screen. No more hard drive chugging away and instant response to selecting options at the opening screen. Your flights "could" take a little longer to load when you hit the "fly now" button but its a very worthwhile tradeoff for a responsive opening screen when the background process was loading data you didn't even need.
