slow play

Between your low end processor and the low amount of memory your going to run slowly. As you said turn down the sliders, I would turn off clouds, shadows and turn scenery way down.
If the video card you have is the one that came with this system then it's a low end card, the new drivers will help some.
Rebooting is one way to shut down a few of the programs that run in the background you can also use a utility that will help you do it.
I've never used this program but I know of others that have.
Don't forget, explorer and systray have to be running.

Let us know how your doing.

http://www.ccs.org/Tips/Download/3Download.htm

Or:

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

thanks, i did do some research and my video card is a RIVA 32MB TNT-2 M64 AGP Video Card R1 and the sound card is a Sound Blaster Live! Value Sound Card . What would you recommend as a minimum for memory and video cards? i know what MS says the minimums are, but i also know that those are really minimum.

😀 Hi
Your sound card is ok(not great but realy ok) Your graphics card is the bare min
With graphic cards you get what you pay for,so more bucks = better graphics
Which one? well thats up to you and how much you want to spend........and what your motherboard will take
I have seen fs9 run well with a fx5200 card (about £40)There is a bit in the forum about it(when I find it I will add it

512mbs for memory ,but again more is better

What a coincidence, it sounds like you have the exact same system specs as my own. I have a 1ghz AMD Athlon processor with 320mb SDRAM and an nVidia TNT2 graphics card. I did however install up to date drivers a few months back for the graphics card.
My graphics settings are on low... which I think is one up from the very lowest. I do get a fair amount of lag if I'm coming in over a complex airport or if traffic is set quite high. Other then that it runs fairly smoothly... it won't win any beauty prizes but at least it works.
Do you run Windows ME as well? It's the OS I use, and ME has a terrible habit of leaking memory. You may open an application with it, close it but system resources are still being drained by it. I do believe there are patches out there to help with this, though I haven't looked deeply into it.
My suggestion if this is the case, is to reboot before playing FS2004 or just go straight into it on starting up (some programs don't leak, but others are a nightmare).
I would also do a few system cleaning exercises. I recommend doing a defrag of your computer, a disk cleanup (always good practice anyway) and also you may need to do scan disk, which I think is required to be done before a defrag.
If you don't know how to do the above, it will be in your Start menu, program files, accessories, system tools and you'll find them in there. If you're using a different version it may be a different path.

As for the minimum specs needed for an acceptable level of gameplay, I think you and I have hit the bottom there. It should be playable, but we do have to sacrifice a lot to achieve that.

Hopefully this will be of some help, but at least now you know that it is possible to play the game at a decent level.
Good luck 👍

😀 Found it ➡

https://forum.flyawaysimulation.com/forum/topic/1121/video-card-question/

Its a long one but it seems to work

i cant even get the game to load, it hangs on the splash screen and i have tried most of the MS solutions and still nothing. i can't even get to the point to tyr to reduce my graphics settings. 😕

I thought you had it going, what happened. Did you add any programs,
download anything new or change any settings.
If no to all of these then try these.

See if this is of any help, did you try to start it in safe mode.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;837195

This is fairly generic to MS.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;258496

A possible last resort would be to do a complete reformatting of your computer, thus sending it back to factory settings.
If you have the ability to burn CDs, you could save all the files and folders you need onto CDs and then load them back up.
I often find this useful if my computer is getting overly cluttered and I don't want the hassle of picking apart loads of programs.
It may seem like a drastic solution, but I always find it to be a very useful, although sometimes time consuming job.
I would suggest trying out FS2004 before loading back any add on software etc you had from before. That way you will know without uncertainty whether it's your system which has the problem or the software etc you added since buying the computer.
If you do have further problems even after all this, then Microsoft should be able to offer further technical support. You certainly seem to have enough specs to play the game.

thanks to everyone for the input and information. I can get it to run pretty well if i do a clean boot and run the game with virtually nothing else running. I am able to have the graphics slider set at normal and even some a little higher and everything seems to be working ok for the system i have. Obviously, i will need to get a new system or seriously update the one i have before 2006 comes out.

thanks again to everyone.