I’m not 100% sure this is a bug or issue, but I wanted to share my experience and maybe help someone who is playing with settings looking for more performance and running into crashes.
What I discovered is that turning off the virtual memory page file on my system coupled with running VR with my HP Reverb G2 causes a crash to desktop 100% of the time when loading any flight. If my headset is turned off, then the flight would load. The cause was I turned off the Windows VIrtual Memory page file. Turning it back on, everything works fine.
As most VR flyers, I am always looking for more performance and when I see someone recommend something I tend to try it out. Since I have 32GB of ram, I read turning off Virtual Memory may smooth stutters out. That didn’t work well for me and caused me a night of troubleshooting. My flights would load to about 80% and then crash to desktop.
Hope someone finds this useful.
System:
Windows 10
Intel 9900K
Asus Strix 3090
32GB Ram
HP Reverb G2
2TB SSD (NVME)
I have an almost identical system, a 9900k all cores @5 GHZ, 64 RAM 512NVME (Drive C:), Strix 3090OC, HPG2 and a 2TB NVME for MSFS. Also have two 1 TB SSDs and an external 5 drive RAID box for backups. I’ve been on windows since the day one (I am 65 years old) and those recommendations about adjusting your virtual memory by changing the values or turning it off if you have lots of RAM don’t do anything but mess up your PC. If your NVME is for drive C:. then it is so fast that when Windows read/write to the virtual RAM will not be noticeable. I only had one single CTD in VR, after a 1 HR flight and probably because I was changing VR settings over and over while flying to be able to find the setting I feel comfortable with.
One thing I recommend evryone to do on a regular basis is a command to check the integrity and restore the health of your windows. I do this at least once a week. This information comes from the MS support website ( [System file check (SFC) Scan and Repair System Files & - Microsoft Community
](System file check (SFC) Scan and Repair System Files & - Microsoft Community
Open your Command prompt in “ADMINITRATOR” mode and type DISM/Online/Cleanup-Image/RestoreHealth
It will compare your system files with the latest image (uses your internet connection) and restore corrupted files.
The problem with trying to “Adapt” your PC to make it work with a program that is constantly changing due to bug fixes, is that even if the change you make to your system works today, it may not work after the next update and if you follow the advice from streamers and other posts here, you better keep a written log of what you have done, because it may be a good idea to revert those changes later or things can get screwy.
It is the opposite, with more memory you can experiment by disabling the VM. Less memory and you do want Windows to use it or you will run out of memory and the system/software will crash. The issues with Windows virtual memory comes from the old days when we used mechanical hard drives, and it helped with the constant disk reads/writes by making adjustments to the virtual memory. Windows came long ways on management of the virtual memory and with the new NVME drives, the read/writes to the VM is not noticebable, there is no performance impact to your PC.