OnCourse Software

There are still some delay issues with key presses and ATC responses. The very worst being in the vicinity of or on the rwy.
At very busy airports like EGLL or LIRF there is a long delay before ATC answers. e.g "Line up and wait" So I line up and wait for at least 5 minutes before being given clearance for take-off. During this time just about every AI takes off in front of me. (sometimes I am the only a/c at the rwy).They also do this while I am waiting at the holding point It seems that PFE allows all the ai to leave before giving the user a/c clearance. Is there any way PFE can give the user a/c priority over AI at the rwy? To be told "expect rwy clearance in 10" at Heathrow is a joke when I am waiting at the holding point already for some time watching other a/c leave. There is also a delay landing. Rarely am I given "actual" clearance to land. Just "continue" When I do land again I have to wait ages until ground wakes up and gives me clearance to the gate. What works reasonably well is at the gate, during taxi(ie P2 giving me instructions) and in the air. It is only at or on the rwy that there is an unacceptable delay.

Vololiberista

Well I'm sorry to say this issue you have with slow response times must be system related, otherwise I would be inundated with such reports.

I guess we've already been along the route of you trying hardware acceleration (if running XP). What about sound card drivers, etc? Do you have an onboard sound card or a separate one?

dmarch wrote:

Well I'm sorry to say this issue you have with slow response times must be system related, otherwise I would be inundated with such reports.

I guess we've already been along the route of you trying hardware acceleration (if running XP). What about sound card drivers, etc? Do you have an onboard sound card or a separate one?

I have a Creative Audigy card with 2006 drivers. It works perfectly. Why would not work only with PFE?
Changing the hardware acceleration settings makes no difference.

I'm sorry but I have no answer for you as to why you have these problem using PFE. I have four machines here that I run PFE and FDC on during testing.... one is a very old IBM machine with very little memory... I use WideFS and have no such problems. That doesn't help you at all I know, but the point I'm trying to make is this is not a software issue in my opnion

One other point that in my view points to a reinstallation of PFE. May I ask how long it takes to do a defrag? On my setup each partition takes about 20 minutes to an hour depending on which defrag programme I use. In other words the used space in each partitiion is about the same. However, the partition in which my PFE is installed quotes 4 hours!!!! It also qoutes just over a quarter of a million files!!!! I know PFE takes up alot of space but it it correct to see quite so many files? How long does it take on average for your systems to defrag a partition with PFE installed?

A defrag for me...(one hard drive) takes 10 to 15 minutes...and my computer is loaded..

Defrag time totally depends on the size of the disk, how many files are on it and the size of the files themselves makes a big difference too and obviously a drive that only spins at 5400rpm is going to take longer than one that spins at 10,000rpm if they have the same amount of data on them. I have 3 drives in my PC and each one is 500Gb in size, the fullest drive is about 60% full and its also the main OS drive, this drive takes about 90 minutes to defrag.

I only do it every 30 to 40 days and I do what is called a name defrag, it puts the files in the same order on the drive as the order they appear in windows explorer. Certain files are put at the outer edge (beginning) of the drive and these files are the ones Windows uses most often and usually a boot time, this helps to speed up the boot times a fair amount as data passes the head far quicker at the outer edges of the platter than they do at the inner edge.

I use O&O defrag pro version 11, its payware but worth every penny. Any defrag software included with your OS be it XP or Vista isn't very good at all and to be honest they are a waste of time. O&O 11 will automatically defrag files whenever the system is idle if you want and any heavily fragmented files will be stealth defragged which literally takes seconds to a couple of minutes, but it isn't as optimally placed as a name defrag, hence the reason for a name defrag every 30 to 40 days for me.

Two of my drives are totally dedicated to FSX and FS9 and hardly ever need defragging as the only data that gets fragmented tend to be saved flights and weather files and they dont really matter very much. I tend to only have defrag those drives when I install a new add-on that is quite large.

vololiberista wrote:

One other point that in my view points to a reinstallation of PFE. May I ask how long it takes to do a defrag? On my setup each partition takes about 20 minutes to an hour depending on which defrag programme I use. In other words the used space in each partitiion is about the same. However, the partition in which my PFE is installed quotes 4 hours!!!! It also qoutes just over a quarter of a million files!!!! I know PFE takes up alot of space but it it correct to see quite so many files? How long does it take on average for your systems to defrag a partition with PFE installed?

Why don't you invest in something like Norton Partition magic,if you already haven't done so which can divide your HD into smaller more manageable partitions that take only a few mins to defrag.
I have a partiton called Oncourse-software where i have FDC and PFE in one area it's size is set at 10gig,so far i have used only 3.84 gigs in total for both programmes.
Another good utility that i use is Diskeeper, it defrags all the time so i can forget about it as it runs in the background.
Both these programmes are payware,

Dave Leesley wrote:

vololiberista wrote:

One other point that in my view points to a reinstallation of PFE. May I ask how long it takes to do a defrag? On my setup each partition takes about 20 minutes to an hour depending on which defrag programme I use. In other words the used space in each partitiion is about the same. However, the partition in which my PFE is installed quotes 4 hours!!!! It also qoutes just over a quarter of a million files!!!! I know PFE takes up alot of space but it it correct to see quite so many files? How long does it take on average for your systems to defrag a partition with PFE installed?

Why don't you invest in something like Norton Partition magic,if you already haven't done so which can divide your HD into smaller more manageable partitions that take only a few mins to defrag.
I have a partiton called Oncourse-software where i have FDC and PFE in one area it's size is set at 10gig,so far i have used only 3.84 gigs in total for both programmes.
Another good utility that i use is Diskeeper, it defrags all the time so i can forget about it as it runs in the background.
Both these programmes are payware,

I actually have 5 partitions!!!! And I use Smart Defrag. It's the fast optimese setting which takes more than 3 hours on the partition which contins PFE. There are so many files!!!

What are your PC specs?