[VC-81_BOLTER]

I am not very convinced that the issue is entirely hardware. I have had this rig running smoothly since 2001. Indeed this issue is only a new one. I flew CFS2 smoothly with a mere 512 Mb of system RAM and on the MoBo video. When Il-2 came out I upgraded to my previous graphics card which was an nvidia 5200 FX with 256 Mb on board RAM and Il-2 ran fine with that. Now the machine is an old one and the card interfaces with an AGP slot so I know my limitations. Later on I upgraded after Pacific Fighters came out so I could see the water better to an nvidia GeForce 7300 GT with 512 Mb of RAM. The system at the time was 1 Gb of RAM and it ran well enough. I am now up to 2 Gb of system RAM and upgraded my processor to a P4@ 2.8 GHz with a second HDD in a pagefile set up as previously described. Until a few weeks ago I was flying fine with frame rates in the 70-75 fps range off line and in the 30's online. Once in a while I had lag issues but this has since resolved when I finally got DSL. I live in a rural area and one way cable was the best I could do until now. I can only guess that if the drivers aren't bad and the hardware is set up right, that the card must be failing?