MAJOR LAUNCH PROBLEM

[Tunafish]

HELP PLEASE !!
I've never had this one before!

Running XP and launching fs9, I now consistently get this message:
"Your computer has run out of memory.Flight Simulator will now exit.You may not have enough free space on your hard drive.Run Disk Cleanup to free up space, and then try running Flight Simulator again."

• There is plenty of space on my HD
  I've done all the cleanup and defrags anyway
  I havn't added any new hardwear, softwear or outrageously large file
  In fact I have changed nothing!
  I have tried re-installing, AND EVEN installing on another drive without it making any difference; after launching a couple of times I get the same error message again.

What gives?
Can somebody please help?

[Groundbound1]

The first thing I would try (also the easiest) would be to find, delete and allow the sim to rebuild your FS9.cfg.

[Tunafish]

The first thing I would try (also the easiest) would be to find, delete and allow the sim to rebuild your FS9.cfg.

Thank you Groundbound
I have just tried this and it has made no difference...

[Capt.Propwash]

what other programs do you have running while you are trying to run/start flight sim? .. internet explorer, antivirus, windows media player, etc etc?

how much ram do you have in your system?  if you are getting "out of memory" errors, something somewhere is eating up all of the available system RAM. (you dont have enough to run everything that you are trying to run)


there are many ways (that i know of) to go about handling this.. but one of the best that I have found, is follow the steps in this thread .. http://205.252.250.26/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaB ... 1208959973 .... I have done everything EXCEPT for the O&O Defrags, and i have gained at least 5-10 FPS in the process.  (i dont have O&O and dont plan on downloading it .. so i skipped the parts where it said to DEFRAG)  I did everything else though.


another thing that you could look into, is a program called GAMEBOOSTER http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html  -- with this little gem, it will temporarily stop/shut down unneeded background applications and services which will in turn free up the RAM to make your system faster.


The more things you turn off (programs and services) the less crap is being loaded into the RAM... ie, no more OUT OF MEMORY.


Also, while you are at it, i would grab CCleaner (http://www.filehippo.com/download_cclea ... 38b/&nbsp; <-- direct download link) to clean the system registry of errors SAFELY, as well as clean up temporary internet files.  you would be amazed at the crap that gets left behind that we no longer need after install/removal of a program.

[Tunafish]

Thank you Capt. Propwash for your assistance.

Here is the situation at present.
I'm running no other programs except for antivirus, have 512 Mo ram and a fairly basic video card: NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX 4000 (all my pc can run, but new system coming soon: Christmas?!)
I've re-installed fs9 so's to reach "settings", have set all displays at "default" and short flight has functioned ok.

[Capt.Propwash]

there is the culprit.  512mb ram.  time for an upgrade to at least 1Gig.. prefferably 2Gig.

you can get by on a single-core Intel Celeron M Processor chip, but dual-core would be better, and from what i gather, an Nvidia 9800(?) graphics card, with 2Gigs of system ram would be the almost ideal setup.


at current, the 512mb ram is what is kicking back the out of memory.  I use to have 512 and got the same messages as you all the time, so i upgraded to 1Gig and went through the paces in the optimization thread.  (yeah they are really meant for Fsx, but if it is supposed to boost FSX, then it should do wonders for FS9.)

[Sir Puma]

I get this occasionally. A cold power cycle always fixes it. The deal is that some programs eat up memory, permanently (at least so long as the system is running.) Some programs, particularly Microshaft products, when they access memory while in use, hold a certain amount of that memory even when you exit the program. If you open and close the program enough, eventually the memory gets eaten up and a cold boot is needed. A hot reboot doesn't always work because the memory never loses power and thus can hold some of it's data.
If you are getting this on a fresh boot, I would see what processes you are running. I have a great little program called "Process Explorer" by Sysinternals that does a great job of showing all the processes running, their relationships, how much CPU process is being used and how much memory is being used.
If you have your boot process set up to load as few files as possible and you still have the issue, run a DOS memory test program and check your RAM. And yes, with only 512MB, you don't have a lot of room to play with. Try turning all the settings down and don't use many add on files, especially large ones.

[jgf]

I ran FS9 on an XP system with 512meg RAM for years and never received any out of memory messages.  Often this message refers to a virtual memory problem, not a RAM issue.

[Tunafish]

My thanks to ALL you Good Members for your support and encouragement.

I hope this list of conclusions will be a helpful epilogue to others in a similar situation. (the first points will be no scoop to most of you !) The apparent cause of my hassles was importing too many scenery add-ons at one time

[JBaymore]

Here is the link to the FS2004 version of Nick N's wonderful instructions for prepping a XP maxchine for the sim.  It is slightly different than the one for FSX.  Once FSX was well established in the simming community Nick said not to use this prior fs2004 one....... but I am not sure if that is more to do with FSX or with stuff he learned. 

How all of this relates to Windows 7 ............haven't a clue.

http://205.252.250.26/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaB ... 63028653/0

BTW... if the sim WAS working fine for you with your 512 M of memory............. and then it suddenly started NOT working fine.... it is NOT the lack of memory.   It might be a BAD memory chip has developed...... but things don't shift like that for no reason.

best,

.................john

[alrot]

I run FS9 for years with 256 ram PC 133 , I made those old models like that , Why don't you do like I do Format your drive and install your original xp again , I always back up everything Including my two extra drives of 1 tb each

I never use the same Instalation xp for more than a year ,even without problems always all computer began to get slow ,I format my main drive Install everything again ,and whala ,Faster computer again 

[microlight]

My Windows 7 installation (64-bit) includes a 512MB card, and FS9 runs sweet as a nut with no problems. The previous XP installation had a 256Mb card; ditto. So physical memory on your graphics card isn't the issue with out-of-memory IMHO.

Have you installed any add-on sceneries around the time that you got the OOM issues? This is a common cause as sometimes there are components of scenery construction that can cause memory 'leaks' which then prompt the error. If the crash coicides with scenery addition, you could try removing the last sceneries you added to see if that makes any difference. You may have to do it by editing the scenery.cfg file if FS9 crashes before you get to the options screen.

[JBaymore]

This is a common cause as sometimes there are components of scenery construction that can cause memory 'leaks' which then prompt the error.

Aha,...... good reminder there microlite........

Tuna, are you running a version of fs2004 that required the 9.1 PATCH ....and maybe you did not re-install it?

[Tunafish]

Good Day friends!

At present FS9 is functionning like a dream

[JBaymore]

Tuna,

First install Fs2004 from the install disks as normal.