Ive just had this problem last night while playing in demo server. I was trying to AFK for awhile so, I decided to press Shift+F4 to change it to windowed mode. To my suprise, the fps dropped so much that from 50~60 to 6 fps! What actually happened? When I pressed Shift+F4 again(to change to full screen mode) the fps seems to be normal (50~60fps)..

Is it me? or my card? or my mind? or lfs.exe?

my card? had the latest driver (that runs well with my card) from ATi.com
lfs.exe? its a V-Patch.

1. Use the windows key to get back to windows.
2. Dont play it in windowed mode.

@anttt... dumb 2nd comment, i always use windowed mode, and also you're wrong about comment 1, you use shift F4

anyways, yea if its staying at something low like that, something is taking over it, my suggestion is that you window it, press ctrl alt del and see if something else is using up more memory or using up a fair ammount, because that.. isn't normal
i use windowed mode and can get up to 100 fps if im lucky, and in fullscreen it goes up to like.. 120 but thats just max, it still stays around the same values full or windowed

Quote from XCNuse :

@anttt... dumb 2nd comment, i always use windowed mode, and also you're wrong about comment 1, you use shift F4

anyways, yea if its staying at something low like that, something is taking over it, my suggestion is that you window it, press ctrl alt del and see if something else is using up more memory or using up a fair ammount, because that.. isn't normal
i use windowed mode and can get up to 100 fps if im lucky, and in fullscreen it goes up to like.. 120 but thats just max, it still stays around the same values full or windowed

okay.. will check it again later.. thanks.

My frame rates drop dramatically in windowed mode when Anti-Aliasing is enabled. If AA is turned off the frame rate drops, but not so dramatically.

In windowed mode, mine has recently begun stuttering, just dropping a few frames every 5 seconds or so. It's very distracting, but fortunately I don't rely on Windowed mode.. I prefer fullscreen. Then this strange stuttering doesn't occur. I've not figured out the cause of the stutter, but it seems to be graphics card related. If I reduce the size of the LFS window (I run 1600x1200 fullscreen @ 85fps fixed, windowed mode is around 1280x960) to 800x600 or thereabouts, the stuttering stops.

Quote from SamH :

In windowed mode, mine has recently begun stuttering, just dropping a few frames every 5 seconds or so. It's very distracting, but fortunately I don't rely on Windowed mode.. I prefer fullscreen. Then this strange stuttering doesn't occur. I've not figured out the cause of the stutter, but it seems to be graphics card related. If I reduce the size of the LFS window (I run 1600x1200 fullscreen @ 85fps fixed, windowed mode is around 1280x960) to 800x600 or thereabouts, the stuttering stops.

Yeah, patch V gave me some wacky stuttering just like this described. Even in Full Screen mode (i only play full-screen) - stuttering is very very very anoying. Driving me soooo insane as to almost enough to give up on LFS. AND I only just bought S2 after having flawless demo gaming for 2 months.

I looked around for help (on lfsforum.net ) and disabled these Windows services:
-Indexing Service
-Performance Logs and Alerts
-QoS RSVP
-System Restore Service

Use Start>>RUN>>msconfig to run the service manager.
I gained about 1fps on average improvement - BUT THE STUTTERING STOPPED !!!! It's probably because my PC is so old. But it worked solid in patch U so I havent upgraded yet.

ahh.. the problem solved. thanks everyone.