It's all in the settings. I have a pretty good computer with about 700 plus Meg of ram and an AMD 2700 processor and if I crank up the settings it will not work too well. 2004 was programmed for the most basic system to the "off the charts" graphics cards. Hit Ctrl Z and see what your frames are. Anything under 12-15 per second is slow and you need to turn down the settings. Anti aliasing, etc.. Higher scenery settings will shut my system down. I only have an NVIDIA MX-400 Vid card w/ 64 meg of ram. Not enough if I want it to look real. Trial and error for about a week worked for me to get the program to run at a decent speed. Sacrifice video quality or buy a $400 video card.