FSX Friend or Foe?

[EHM-2581 Dirk]

As many of the Forum followers may remember I have had my fair share of problems - with FSX in particular. This posting carries on from "FSX Hanging" under Operations. There one will notice that I have had to bow out of flights
that I had been looking to for a long time - to fly together with other on-line  pilots. Briefly, during my last attempt we were in flight when FSX froze up on me. This resulted in the other pilots advising that I should restart the flight
and try to catch up. This was done but the situation repeated itself so the towel was thrown in.
A very big decision had to be made. To stop flying or fix the problem. According to enquiries the problem could be the pc's operating system. At the time I was running on a socket 775 motherboard, A Q6600 processor together with
4 Gig DDR2 Ram. Which should have easily been able to handle FSX.
Fact is we decided to draw on some holiday money and take the leap. The PC was upgraded as follows. Motherboard = Gigabyte G1 Sniper B5, which has been designed with gaming in mind,  Processor = i5 running at 3.2 and
one stick of 8Gig DDR3 Ram. To top this all it was decided to go for a new Solid State Hard drive just to make sure that there is "no possible bottleneck".
And what a joy. Smooth. Even with display settings higher than I had previously used, no hitches were come across.
The first 7 legs of the Africa tour were tackled and Flight Logger did it's bit great.  Leg 8 - Moori to Berbera. 35nm From Destination. I was watching the progress carefully and suspected something to be wrong. My eyes went up
automatically to the very top bar. Microsoft Flight Simulator X.  There it was. But in brackets behind it the dreaded word (Not Responding). Impossible. This could not be happening. Yet there it was, familiar as ever.
The necessary was done. I waited it out while all the time keeping an eye on the hard drive indicator light. It was running like F1. The patience paid of and after about 10 minutes the problem had cleared it self. No further problem.
Leg 10. Kisimayu to Tanga. Smooth sailing. 35nm from destination IT happened, again. "Not responding".
I shall refrain from becoming emotional. This is too high above me.
Fact of the matter is a decision needs to be made  -  and this is the reason for this particular posting. I would like to have input from any and knowledgeable fellow pilots on the following.

1. Stop flying. go back to old days of Shooters and rather make war.
2. Ignore the problem in the hope it was just a one (two)-off occurrence.
3. Consider the possibility that I have a gammy version of FSX and investigate the possibility of going the X-Plane route?  Alexander, here in particular, your input will be appreciated, please.
    I need to mention the following. I loaded the Deluxe Version of FSX first. All went well until registration. A message came up saying "This can not be registered. The maximum amount of installations has been exceeded"
    What???. a limited amount of registrations??  Anyone ever heard of this before?    Fact is I installed the standard version (which as been used many more times) and no such problem was come across.

Please, I am dying to fly on line again. And I know other on line pilots will be pleased if the amount increases.  But.   Will another let-down be survived. The embarrassment of having to restart a flight as such is to daunting.

Any and all input will be appreciated.

Kind regards

Dirk
EHM2581

[EHM-2097 Andrei]

Hi Dirk,

First of all, sorry to hear about your FSX misfortunes.

There is indeed a limited number of registrations for FSX (3, if I recall well). As far as I know, this should apply to all FSX versions. However, I am not quite sure how this works, it's possible that multiple registrations on the same OS and hardware (in Microsoft's acception of the "same hardware" term) count as 1 registration.

Nevertheless, it's rather bad for MS to do this with the last product in the line (thus "condemned" to be here for many years, and reinstalled again and again after hardware upgrades).

Actually, this was one reason for me NOT to perform my 3rd installation and registration. The other reason was that after using FS9 and trying to use FSX on the same hardware+software setup, FSX needed significantly more resources (even with most graphic sliders to the left end), and this may be the difference between usable and unusable.  The third reason is that I am not particularly delighted to see cars on the roads or birds in the sky (that could come from my technical - rather than artistic - background) .

So, even today, I am still using FS9 for IFR flights and trying to use X-Plane for VFR flights. Why "trying"? First because in X-Plane it's significantly more difficult fo fly a plane (it's probably more realistic too, but difficult is difficult...). Then, there are some significant differences in the "look-and-feel" of the program, which make difficult to get accustomed to BOTH MSFS and X-Plane. For instance, it happened to me (twice!), during a VFR group flight, to click the wrong button when closing the map, and realize that I actually closed X-Plane (no warning/confirmation message). Last but not least, X-Plane crashes do happen; not very often, but more often than in FS9 (which remains the most stable of these products, judging by the crash count over many years).

However, I never tried an IFR flight with X-Plane, or any payware aircraft, to see what extra these bring to the flying experience. Yo need input on this part from more seasoned X-Plane flyers than me.

Basically, for online IFR flights I prefer FS9 for it's stability, and for (mostly offline) VFR flights I prefer X-Plane for its far superior terrain rendering (it's not only a matter of resolution and textures, but in MSFS I was driven crazy by the rivers that often flow uphill)

Andrei

[EHM-2581 Dirk]

Thank you for your input Andrei,

Your comments are noted and will be taken in consideration.

Dirk