Top 5 things to do to get FSX performing better

I thought I’d put together a quick list of things to do to help you get the most from your Flight Simulator X experience. I’ve largely excluded specific FSX tweaks, with the exception of the default.xml renaming, as this is such an easy one. There are many that are well worth doing, but they are already mentioned in a number of other places, as well as in some of my previous posts. This is more of a general guide and applies equally to any other system sapping game you might wish to play.

1. Defrag your hard disk - you can read an equal number of articles on the Internet that say this is worth doing and not worth doing. All I know is, with a defragged drive, the sim is a lot smoother than with a fragged drive. Most defragmentation software has a demo, so give them a try and see what you think. Personally, I’d recommend Magical Defrag from Ashampoo. I actually parted with my own hard-earned cash for this - you can read my review here.
2. Rename the default.xml file. I’ve found this always gives a worthwhile performance improvement. You can find it in D:/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Microsoft Flight Simulator X/Autogen/ (change D at the start to the drive you installed to). 
3. Always do a PC restart before simming. When using your PC for a while, all sorts of stuff ends of hanging around in RAM. Without fail, the performance of the sim improves for me if it’s the first thing I run when I start my machine compared to when I run it after my machine has been on for a while.
4. Shut down system protection applications when simming - this includes (especially) anti-virus software, although obviously I wouldn’t recommend downloading anything or retrieving your email to your PC whilst this is switched off. Likewise, shutdown your anti-spyware with the same caveats as for shutting down your anti-virus. All of these bits of software designed to protect your machine also do a good job of hammering it, leaving less CPU cycles for the simulator. If you’re behind a NAT router, it SHOULD be safe to also shut down your software firewall whilst simming, but try and keep off the web. Common sense applies here. I can’t be held responsible if you’re machine suddenly gets attacked whilst protection software is disabled (sorry about having to bang in a disclaimer, but you know what it’s like), but if you don’t go doing anything that might invite such an attack, you should be fine.
5. Shut down your browser whilst flying. If you’re using, say, Firefox as your browser and it’s been open a few hours, you could easily find it’s used 100 - 200 Mb RAM due it’s memory leak problems. This is 100 - 200 Mb the sim hasn’t got.

I hope you find these useful and if you’ve got any more quick tips, please add a comment and let the world know

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