Help with Settings FS 2004

What you can do is max out the slides (to the right) on scenery and autogen. Keep them fairly low on clouds, shadows can be off if you like, check and see if you want them on or off, they use "power".
Traffic also uses power so set it as you like.

As far as add-ons, most won't use any or very little power therefore having little effect on your FPS which you can set at 27-30.
By add on, I'm talking USA Roads, a traffic (I use Ultimate Traffic).
You can add as many aircraft to your folder as you like, it won't slow the sim, all it will do is slow the initial loading of the sim, a minute longer.

If you have any questions (and you will) please ask away!

Thanks a million. That's enough info to put me where I want to be for now. I'll have more questions, but I'll work with these issues now.
Thanks again,
Al

Hi,
I tried thjose settings you suggested and it seems to work pretty good. But the only thing is the display gets all scrambled up when I am in the "pilot view" window. Everything is fine in all other views. I've cut "clouds" down and tried simple clouds etc. But I can't seem to shake that one problem. I installed FS right from the CD and have not updated anything. Could that be possiblr the problem?
Thanks
Al

Updating is a mixed bag, sometimes it helps some times it doesn't.
Do you have the ATC window on, or the 2 lines of red statistics (Shift+Z). They could interfere.

If not try turning off one of your FPS draining slides like scenery, or traffic and see if most of your cards power is going to them.