Hello all, I am new to this forum and FSX, but an old real world light aircraft pilot and a flight simmer since the days of FS5.

The reason why I am new to FSX is because my old hard drive with FS9 on it went into a coma    so I took the opportunity to 'upgrade from Windows XP to 7 64 bit (Home Premium) & from FS9 to FSX.

So far, all I have loaded is FSX Gold and Acceleration and FS Genesis terrain plus a few addon aeroplanes.

I know it is gouing to take me ages to get FSX to anywhere near how I had FS9 set up, but so far I have a few issues which I cannot rectify and could do with some advice.

1/. Additional aircraft get out of order in the menu with wrong pictures of the aircraft, what causes this and how do I rectify it? I have deleted and reinstalled the new aircraft from where the error started and this temporarily cured the problem, but it reappeared again later 

2/. How do you get rid of the men bar at the top of the screen after hitting the Alt key to bring up the Flight, Weather, options etc? I find this annoying.

3/. Prop discs with portover aircraft have issues. They look wrong and when viewed from outside the prop vanishes behind clouds 1000's of feet away, is there a simple fix?

4/. Errors with gauges, understandable if annoying with older gauges used on FS2004 aircraft, but also with aircraft designed for FSX, can I replace or fix the problem?

I have plenty of other issues with which I am not happy with in FSX, but as I said, it will take time to set up how I had my old FS9, but I had that running at 60+ fps (except going into a major hub in a busy city like London, Heathrow where it dropped to 20-30 fps) over photographic scenery with no blurries even when flying at 300 kias at 3000' with everything maxed out.

I am wondering if I have made a mistake in upgrading to FSX as I was generally quite happy with what I had, but there are some aspects of FSX that are vast improvements over FS9, water, ai ships, boats and road traffic, birds, but I am disappointed with the stock terrain and textures, the water colour and the autogen.

I suspect FSX is going to constitute a serious wealth hazard, which is an ailment I am already suffering from having had to give up work (and real flying) though poor health  as it looks as if I will not be able to use any of the plethora of add on scenery software I already have for FS9.

Many thanks for any advice.

Thanks for the help djbozz, I had already worked out that placing a thumbnail picture in the texure folder added the picture to the aircraft menu, but that isn't what is cause the problem.

Aircraft with or without thumbnails get mixed up, for exapmple I might get a picure of a Robinson helicopter, but with text below saying Piper ????. The aircraft selected is the one mentioned in the text, not the picure.

Next time I fly with FSX I will try holding the Alt key down for a bit longer t see if that works.

I have changed or installed 2D panels in a few aeroplanes as I prefer to fly with a 2D panel rather than 3D (virtually useless, damaged thumb), but even with a FSX panel I had a warning message about gauges  not being supported by FSX.

Where did you install FSX. It should not be installed in its default folder it causes security issues. Best to put it on another drive or create a c:/fsx folder and put it there. Will over come most issues.
You cant fix the prop behind clouds issue its a Model thing.
Most people have issues flying into busy air[otrts, tomany things happening.
Once you have stuck it out a bit i dont think you will want to go back to fs9. There are plenty of brilliant freeware planes out there for fsx, Look for plane by Dino  or piglet. There is also a freeware piper cub.

There is something I will never understand.
I've seen many people getting this shifted thumbnails problem in FSX upon installing a new plane that had no thumbnail. However, I never ever had this problem. When I install a plane without thumbnail, it gets a generic thumbnail with a '?' mark on it. No shift or whatsoever. How comes the situation is not the same for everybody ? 
By the way, I have FSX Deluxe + Acceleration, the situation was the same on WinXP 32 bits and Win7 64 bits.

I have always had a lot of FS9 planes in my FSX hangar, and they never caused any problems :/

Thanks Hagar, I will try that fix next time I get a problem. At the moment everything is in the correct order (apart from my keyboard, spilt beer makes for sticky keys not to mention being a waste)

I keep coming across random weirdness each time I fly (black cockpit canopy in one texture variant, but perfect in another even though the same glass texture is in both folders) and suspect I will be uninstalling FSX and reinstalling it in a non default directory.

As I said in my first post, it's all new and will take time to get used to it and set it up as I want. It took me six years to get FS9 how I wanted it and I was still working on that when I lost the lot 

Hagar wrote on Mar 2^nd, 2011 at 3:33pm:



Thanks for the offer Hagar, I might take you up om it later, but at the moment everything is totally new to me and I am on a steep learning curve and I don't just mean with FSX.

I have a new motherboard and card. I have just upgraded from XP to Windows 7 and I am still experimenting with the multitude of Nvidia settings to get my display as I want it. At the moment I am just getting used to how things work and where they are and all of this is being interrupted by trying to earn a bit of a living.

whitley wrote on Mar 1^st, 2011 at 2:58pm:


If I understand correctly, you have difficulty using the hat switch due to a damaged thumb. You might want to look at TrackIR. I highly recommend it.

http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/