Strange Lock up

[strudders]

This has started happening over the past few days.

whilst flying the screen will lock/freeze. It only lasts 6 seconds or so, however the sound remains on until the screen unfreezes whereupon it sort of judders. after this I can fly along until it does it again.

I have other games more demanding on my graphics Card than FS2004 (Farcry runs the GPU at full tilt with no issues) so I am sure its not the card.

One point of notice, my memory usage for FS is around 400MB committed. This to me seems very high as It always used to be less?

Please help!

I look forward to your replies

Happy flying

Struds

[Bruce]

some system specs would help give us some idea of what could be causing it, although it sounds as if you may be a bit short of RAM.

[strudders]

Opps sorry Might help.

P4 3.2 800 FSB
1 Gb DC DDR (2 X 512)
Ausus P4C800 E Delux
Geforce FX 5950 256
Sblaster Live
MS Sidewinder 1 (via game port on SB)
2 X Samsung 160 Gbt HD
550w Power supply
XP home
Nvidia 56.72 drivers

Best Regards

Struds

[Bruce]

um strange there seems to be enough RAM there and the rest of the system is well up there and should have no probs running FS, the only thing there that looks even slightly suspect is the sound card, do you have onboard sound, the latest stuff is getting pretty good and is often better than even the best sound cards as far as performance goes (check out toms hardware to see what i mean) i gained an 8% increase in frame rate my distching my card in favour of the onboard. if you have no onboard, try disabling your SB to see if that makes matters any better. also you may want to try a USB control device, i could never get a game port to work in XP since ditching my SB. you can buy adapters if you are attached to your old device :)

[strudders]

Thanks very much for that advise.

Since my last post it done it again except the system crashed (good in one way) error report from XP has it down to the Nvidia driver, so I have rolled back to 56.64. I will give that till Monday.

I did buy a USB Joystick but I have come back to my SW 1 because it is so good (old habits die hard!)and the wingman was sooo rubbish! LOL. However I will take your advice and ditch the SB (funny, but bought at the same time as the MS SW 1). I have a game port as part of the Asus MB, so I will try that even if the Nvidia drivers work.

Thanks very much Bruce

Regards

Struds