FSX and Windows 7 64b

[EHM-2155 Mariano]

Hello guys
I'm trying to get back into my simming, I'm glad to see EuroHarmony doing well since I been out, feels like home to be back.

However, I have some issues.
Since I stopped, I upgraded my rig a bit. Added RAM, added an SSD, and updated it to Windows 7 64 bits. So naturally I decided to leave the 10 year old FS9 behind and upgrade to the "newer" FSX.
It seems that FSX and Windows 7 do not like to work together. I am getting a "Fatal Error" and crash-to-desktop while flying. I couldn't complete a single flight yet, so I haven't even downloaded the Flight Logger to get back into transporting those eager EuroHarmony passengers.

I found this somewhere on the internet:

THE BOTTOM LINE IS THAT THE UIAUTOMATIONCORE.DLL FILE CAUSES OTHER DLL FILES TO MALFUNCTION!
Alright folks, I have the fix---after a whole year of fidgeting and spending $600 on every stinking version of windows out there-XP 32 bit. XP proffessional 64, vista HP32, vista HP 64, Win 7 32 & 64 RC, Win 7 32 enterprise and Win 7 64 bit professional (my primary FSX OS on which I did the succesful fix). As simple as it may sound this works. I tried replacing the Uiautomationcore.dll file and FSX would still crash albeit after a while. And if it wasn't that dll file then it would be some other file like ntdll. So I tried completely deleting the uiautomationcore.dll file from both the syswow64 and system 32 folders. Now I am playing FSX with graphics and traffic settings set to custom and turned all the way up while  I have aircraft, scenery and weather settings turned to ultra high and no crashes for two days!!!! I can click in and out of any menu such as the MAP or virtual flight path or change aircraft mid-flight or change weather mid-flight with no crashing. I have tried every which way to get FSX to crash and I just cannot get it to!
FSX really is awesome when it works.
HERE IS THE FIX: You may have to take ownership of the files if windows stops you from deleting the file. Open CMD prompt and right click to run as administrator and then type in exactly as below substituting your windows login username where it says username:
takeown /f C:\Windows\System32\uiautomationcore.dll
cacls C:\Windows\System32\uiautomationcore.dll /G username:F
takeown /f C:\Windows\Syswow64\uiautomationcore.dll
cacls C:\Windows\Syswow64\uiautomationcore.dll /G username:F
Now you can just navigate to your syswow64 and system32 folders in windows explorer and after backing up the UIautomationcore.dll files just delete them from your computer. (Remember to delete the Uiatomationcore.dll file in ure FSX folder also if you installed it as the fix in other posts.)
If you have Nvidia cards download their latest driver also. Its got a huge performance increase. The only problem I have had by deleting the UIautomationcore.dll file is that if I exit FSX completely while in flight my windows desktop becomes dysfunctional and I have to restart. If I first end the flight and then exit FSX I have no problem. I have four different OS's on seperate partitions on my computer built specifically for FSX. There is no point in playing FSX on any 32 bit version of windows because you will get more out of FS 2004 than FSX on a 32 bit system.
Now, since I have 12 gigs of RAM, dual 9800GT's, intel core i7 920 running at stock (cuz MSI MB's suck for OC), and three 22" monitors-- instead of getting 10 FPS (on my 32 bit windows 7)I get 25 FPS on my 64 bit Windows 7 with two virtual cockpit windows on two monitors and all of my instruments on the 3rd monitor. BTW 6 GB (if you have tri-channel) or 8GB Ram (if you have dual channel) with a 64 bit OS is plenty-I just found my DDR3 RAM for dirt cheap at Microcenter a year ago. 4 GB is not enough as you will get OOM errors with settings even turned up halfway. No need to buy fancy graphics cards either because FSX is CPU intensive and doesn't really do well on the newer graphics cards. The 9800GT's are dirt cheap at like $70. Also definitely upgrade to the core i7.

I did as instructed, those .dlls are definitely gone from my system. Yet my problem remain. My Windows installation is fairly clean, I don't think there's much chance it's a conflict with something else. FSX was updated to SP1.

Now my options are as follows... either I find some obscure solution to FSX (or someone here could direct me to one), or I go back to FS9, or I change to x-plane, which I've never used in my life.

Any suggestions?

[EHM-1997 Alexander]

BAck in the day, the solution for the uiautomation problem was to download the vista copies of the dll and place in the fsx folder.

http://forums.flightsimlabs.com/index.php?/topic/3516-fsx-and-windows-7-in-64-bits-needs-uiautomationcoredll-to-stop-crashing/

X-Plane is fantastic, but very different. I recommend grabbing it and flying it along side FSX. Use FSX for your heavies and x-plane for GA, then slowly move over to heavies in x-plane.

[EHM-2155 Mariano]

Okay, I will try a medium distance flight with that .dll in place, should give it enough times to crash if it wants to.

Otherwise, frustration towards FSX will make me give X-plane a try.

[EHM-2155 Mariano]

Ok I am now officially frustrated with FSX. It's slow, it's sluggish, it's flimsy, and half our fleet's aircraft are not available for it.

It really shows how much of a poor job it was in the first place, 7 years after with modern hardware, I can't run it properly. It also sucks that the flight sim team has been dissolved and we won't see any direct successor, Microsoft Flight being such a limited product.

I guess it's back to FS9?

[EHM-1465 Dominic]

Hi Mariano,

Like many other pilots I have stuck with FS9 because, after a lot of experimentation, I couldn't get what I wanted out of FSX

However, before you give up on FSX, have you tried the various tweaks that are recommended for it around the Web? There are a number of suggestions which are reputed to improve FSX performance by a large margin, try THIS PAGE and THIS PAGE and see what effect that has if you haven't tried tweaking yet

Good luck!

[EHM-2387 Eric-Jan]

I have FSX running on W7 Home Premium 64, an i7-860 (2.8MHz) CPU, 6GB RAM, two 1TB Harddisks, of which one is dedicated to FS (FS9, FSX, XP9, AND XP10 ), with NVIDEA GTX 640 1GB GFX card. A top-line system when I bought it, but considered mid-range nowadays ...
When I fly the Aerosoft DA-20 4X in the Netherlands, with the full NL-2000 scenery installed, framerates drop down to about 20, which is still well flyable. In other parts of the world, without the addon scenery, I hit 40 up to 60 fps.

I did not do anything special (no tweaking with dll's or the likes) other than install the Accelleration addon (which equals Service Pack 2, performance wise, if I remember well). So maybe there's your solution? Install at least SP2 ... http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8986