I counted 40 people at the meeting. Here are the topics discussed with
responses.

1. The codec mystery - RodB
This item was placed on the board after it had remained empty for some
considerable time. I was attempting to view an .avi file produced by
my digital camera. Windows Media Player could do it, but not Irfanview
with plug ins. I'view wanted vids:mjpg. A Google search presented me
with a page containing erotic offerings and more valuably a
downloadable mcmjpg.dll install file. I'view now can display the
movie. The site concerned is: http://codecs.nm.ru/

2. HGHB O&O products for XP - Roger
For serious game users and, particularly, flight simulator buffs,
Windows XP is the OS of choice. However, it still has some difficulty
with the size and complexity of the newer simulators and some user
tweaking can work wonders.

Firstly, you should do a clean install (not an over-the-top of 98SE)
as this will remove a lot of artefact left in your system registry and
you should opt for the NTSF file system with a sector size of 4096 Kb.

You should have a minimum of 256 Mb RAM but, with flight simulator
under XP, more is better than less.

Then disable "last Access". Whenever any file in an NTSF system is
accessed, NTSF will write a few bytes that sets a last access time and
date to that file. So in effect every NTSF read operation becomes a
write operation as well. This can have a critical impact on
performance when a program accesses a lot of files during loading
(fltsim accesses some 2,500 files). All you want is a read operation
as you have no sound reason to want to know your last access to flight
simulator files. Disable last access as follows, the result is faster
hard disk file read access:

Go to: Start > Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt. This will get
you to the good old DOS Prompt.

Type in the command: "fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1"

Then consider using file compression which is supported by NTSF. With
this, your computer is doing less work accessing the hard drive since
it has to read less data off the hard disk. With the modern fast
processor the trade-off between compression time and hard disk access
results in overall faster file/data access from the hard disk into
memory - provided your system is fast enough. With flight Simulator
2002, tests show that 1.6 GHz is the break-even point. Above that, use
file compression; below that figure, don't. Remember, you can choose
to compress any folder, any file and/or your entire hard disk.

File fragmentation is the primary cause of degraded hard disk
performance when using programmes such as flight simulator. Just
installing a full installation of FS2002 on a cleanly formatted 3 Gb
partition results in 4,500 fragmented files and a 45% fragmented hard
disk. Continually adding and removing aircraft and other goodies
downloaded from the net keeps your disk in a happily fragmented state.

Tests indicate that the best defragger for XP is O&O Defrag by O&O
Software GmbH of Germany. This product will both defrag and align all
of your 30,000 odd FS2002 files which no other defragger (including
the Win XP one) does to the same extent. For example, if your hard
disk is a modern 80 Gb drive, only 2% of that area is accessed to load
FS2002 if the disk is properly defragged. Otherwise, the read head
could move up to 100 times the distance to load the same files from a
fragmented system.

However, you will probably be aware that fragmentation of your drives
has little observable impact on most of your computing operations and
that defragging modern large disks can be an overnight affair.
Therefore you might consider partitioning your drive into (say) three
categories:

1.    Programs and applications,
2.    Data files, and
3.    Flight Simulator or other games.

If you do this, then turn off System Restore for the flight simulator
drive. This will minimize fragmentation of that drive caused by System
Restore writes to the hard disk.

Finally, you need good caching. Window
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