I came across the following 'X-plane FAQ' today, and I learned quite a lot of useful tips. The most useful being how to stop the frequent 10 second pauses in X-plane ..caused by the scenery loading. What a difference being able to fly non-stop without a pause! (I still get a very tiny pause, caused by the scenery loading from the Hdrive perhaps? But its hardly noticeable).

Apologies to everyone who already knows about this fix.
-->

X-Plane FAQ

http://home.earthlink.net/~x-plane/FAQ-Performance.html

Question:
I have noticed that when I am running X-Plane every once in a while X-Plane freezes for a couple seconds and the CD-Rom starts spinning.
Answer:
X-Plane is loading new scenery. The scenery is organized into one degree squares. The Low Enroute window contains a 3x2 degree patch of the terrain and X-Plane keeps you more or less in the center of that window by loading whole degrees of scenery as you move.
If you want to speed this up, have a look in the DATA folder on the X-Plane CD. You'll see folders named something like +40-080. Each folder covers a 10x10 degree square and the name is the latitude and longitude of the lower right corner of the square. So for example +40-080 covers the northeastern USA and southern Quebec. Simply copy the folders for the areas you fly in to your X-Plane folder on your hard drive, into Resources\Earth Nav Data.

Note!! The X-Plane install includes the +30-120 and +30-130 folders to cover parts of the US west coast. These folders are not fully populated; the remaining scenery files are on the CD. DO NOT simply copy the complete +30-120 and +30-130 folders from the CD to the HD. A couple of the scenery files on the CD are wierd and are not recognized by X-Plane. The folders in the install contain good copies. Only copy files from the CD that are not yet on the HD.

More useful tips >>

http://home.earthlink.net/~x-plane/Xplane_FAQ.html