I keep having problems with FSX, for over a year already. Can anyone help me get FSX installed propperly?

I'm not a flightsim-pro, I have no need for the ultimate FSX-experience, I only want to relax with a fun flight, so now and then.
I have one decent computer for all my work, which runs all the normal programs as msn, skype, firefox, photo and video editing, etc and I simply want to run a fun game at the side.

Some of the problems I get stuck with:
-Traffic signs/wind direction poles on the runway.
-Wheels, shadows, or flying lights drive over the roads on the airports, with no vehicle attatched.
-Being directed back and forth between 2 ATC sources, like Rotterdam hands me to Schiphol, schiphol hands me back to Rotterdam, back to Schiphol, back to Rotterdam and so on and so on...(Is there a 'make up your fucking mind'-button to use in ATC? A 'fuck you'-button would be satisfying as well). Then when I get handed to another controller I often only get the option to go back to the one that just handed me off and I keep getting back to the same controller all the time.
-Engines wont start. When I run a freshly installed FSX all aircrafts work fine, the engine is running when I load the game and they keep running all through the flight, but after a while the engines arent running when I get in and I cant get them to start, or they turn off once they're started. I also notice that the left engine does start(for a short while), but the right doesnt start at all.
-ATC window closes when I switch frequencies on any radio.
-Progressive taxing only shows when looking at it from one direction and disappears when you turn your point of view, which mostly means I have to look at the nose of the aircraft and drive the aircraft towards my point of view. In other words, I have to drive backwards with my point of view over the markings.
-As soon as I start installing addon scenery or aircrafts, all kinds of wierd bugs show themselves once or a couple of times and this can be a lot of different things, this isnt constantly the same thing with the same addon, but differs every time. Can be that GPS guided flight misses turns, that instruments go wack, ATC controllers stop giving commands halfway a flight, buildings show in impossible places(for instance, on the runway), roads run over buildings, ground vihicles drive through buildings, I get a different GPS in the GPS screen then the one that's present in the aircraft, aircrafts are parked in blocks and covers and I cant remove those, HDG and/or ALT are already switched on when I turn on autopilot, al kinds of bugs appear when switching from GPS-mode to NAV-mode, and a lot more things that have shown themselves once or twice, but nothing seems to appear as a consistant effect from a specific procedure.

Advised by FSX support from Microsoft, I already rebuild most of my computer, installed a 64bit win7 and I've been trying all kinds of things for almost a year and Microsoft cant give me one single fix for any of the problems.

I also tried to install the whole computer for FSX only and followed all instruction from Nick N, but this didnt make any difference concerning the problems I just mentioned.

So... HELP! Can anyone hand me any advise to get my FSX running propperly?

Thanks

Demious wrote on Apr 24^th, 2012 at 12:26pm:


, same here,but please remember this is a family friendly forum,and have a nice soft pillow on your desk so your head wont hurt as much when your beating your self on it.

I feel your pain, and I'm sure most everyone on this site does too, but you came to the right place to get the best info on the web to find out how to get your FSX up and running. As Daube said, FS9 is a much more user friendly sim and will get you flying right out of the box. FSX takes awhile to set up, your on the right track by going to Nick N's sticky. My advice is to take one problem at a time, don't add any add-on's untill you get the base FSX running. Once you get it going good it's well worth it. Fegedabout the ATC, sorry to say, that's the virtual government for ya .
Goodluck and welcome to the headbangers club!

Demious wrote on May 2^nd, 2012 at 3:24pm:


No your FSX addons will not work at all with FS9.
However, FS9 has quite a great base of freeware and payware addons to choose from. If you're looking for fun and relaxation, you won't need to buy any payware, a lot of freeware addons will bring you just that.

Concerning the bugs in FSX, there has been two patches, SP1 and SP2 (and Acceleration, which is SP2 with some additionnal and specific stuff). There were no additionnal updates. FSX still has a lot of bugs but nowadays with a little bit of info gathering on the forums, anybody can find the explanations on how to configure the sim properly.

I'm using FSX and I absolutely love it. But I do not only use it for fun and relaxation, I also use it because of the unmatched realism of some of its addons (paywares), which is why I cannot switch back to FS9. On the contrary, you should not get any problems with FS9:
- you will get tons of freeware planes (fun, sci-fi, airliners, general aviation etc...) that won't get any display problems
- you won't get anything like OrbX sceneries, but you will nevertheless find quite a lot of nice airport sceneries, nice-enough landclasses, nice-enough meshes etc...
- you won't get any crisp photorealistic sceneries, only 5m/pixel ones, but they already look quite good once you reach a certain altitude. Check out http://www.blueskyscenery.com/ to discover some excellent examples.

FS9 is definitely worth a try in your case.

Ok, if you liked the OrbX sceneries, then there is indeed no way back to FS9, so let's forget about this.

What is your current hardware ?
Getting FSX to work properly will require multiple steps, from setting up the game settings, the video card settings, and finally optimizing the FSX.cfg.

There are only four things that you need to keep in mind when you buy a new computer for FSX:

1- FSX wants cores and GHz. Dual cores are not a good choice. Go for quad-cores or higher. Also, don't even think about buying any CPU running at less than 3,2 GHz. The rule is simple: the more cores, the fewer blurries. The more GHz, the more FPS. Go for an i7. A 2600K is a great start, but even my i7 960 gives some nice results already, as you could see on my various screenshots.

2- FSX doesn't need a high end video card, but cheap video card (low range) are forbidden. NVidia card names are quite easy to understand:
- first number (hundreds) = the generation (more or less, because the tend to lie from time to time). The higher, the more recent.
- second number (tens)= the quality. '9' are for extreme gamers. '8' are perfect. '6' are minimums. Anything below 6 is for Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
- the third number is useless.
- the letters are relative to the power as well, but I'm not too sure about this.
Anyways, I have a NVidia GTX480 from Asus and it gives fantastic results. The card power is important to deal with high screen resolutions, AntiAliasing and Anisotropic filtering, and finally to handle the high-res textures on some airplanes or sceneries. You don't need the top, you must avoid the cheap, you must aim for the "good".

3- Power supply: ensure the power supply unit in your computer case is a powerfull one, enough to handle your video card (!!), the various harddrives (you might want to add some in future), the memory, the additionnal fans for the CPU, and the CPU itself.

4- cooling: summer is coming. FSX will transform your PC into a volcano and your CPU+video card will become lava if your computer case is not cooled properly. As we're just getting out of winter, people are not thinking about this too much at the moment. But in just a few weeks, we will start seeing so much topics about computers crashing on all forums, just like EVERY year ! So plan some money to get an efficient computer case, or AT LEAST a serious CPU cooling system.

Interesting reading.

For all the love in the world, and hours of faffing, i finally admitted defeat trying to get FSX to run anything like properly on my old Intel based core duo iMac running Win 7. However it ran fs9 to perfection.

The solution? I bought a Quad core i5 iMac. Ive not even touched the cfg, and it runs FSX beautifully. With the sliders maxed it still runs ok suprisingly, knock them back a little and its very smooth, now ive gone from win 7 32bit to 64 anyway! Using 32bit was a mistake!

With your PC, i dont think youll ever get there - sorry to say, but only based on my core duo experience. Fs9 on the other hand, can be made to look very good and run very well. I still think it can give FSX a run for its money.

Good luck!

Demious wrote on May 9^th, 2012 at 6:06am:


What a wonderful question!... ...!

...and one which still has me baffled, even today!... ...!

Paul... ...!

As an 8-Bit, Zilog Z80, Computer programmer from long, long ago, I have always suspected that it was due to Ace's coding of FSX which maybe was rushed, and not very efficient at the time...Microsoft delivery demands?
Perhaps, if they were to do it all over again, it may be much improved, and more efficient?

Bought a new computer this week, think this one is gonna do a lot better already.

Processors: intell core i5-2310
RAM: 6GB DDR3
Video card: Geforce GT550
Hard discs: Seagate Baracuda 7200rpm & Kingston SSDnow200 (got FSX on this drive)
OS: Win7 64bit

Everything seems to run very smooth and aircrafts fly more stable and easy then ever before.
I just started testing and only problem I'm experiencing so far, is that once I start using ATC, there are no voices and the volume of the overall sound goes down by a lot.
Do you know what the problem is here?