Simviation Forums

hello all,
i am a student pilot, and long time user of flight simulator. i have a couple of questions, and hope that i can get some help from you guys. first, even though i still have both of my dvd's, i have lost my keycode. so when i am flying, the program will stop right in the middle, and ask me to activate it. so i can only fly for about ten minutes or so. is there a way to extract the key code  from the dvd's? or is there any other way to recover the keycode?
also, does anyone know of a scenery add on for columbia south carolina, and it's surrounding fbo's? also, i have never thought that the graphic's in X were as good as fs2004, or am i just missing how to make them better. i put the five or six sliders on full, on the settings page, but the detail doesn't seem to be that great. any help on these problems would be greatly appreciated. thanks.

The key is normally written directly inside the box containing the DVDs. If you lost it, you can try to contact Microsoft on the phone.

Concerning the details, if your sceneries don't better than FS9, there are two possible cases:

1- you were using special sceneries in FS9 but still using pure default in FSX. You'll have to download FSX sceneries for the area, you can surely find some here at Simviation, and also at other sites like avsim or flightsim.com.

2- pushing the settings to max will not help if your computer is not powerfull enough to display them. The more the CPU gets overloaded, the worst the graphics get. You must find a good balance between the visual quality and the performance of your CPU. Read the sticky topics at the top of the FSX sections, they'll provide you a lot of information on how to optimise your system and FSX.

i have a much more powerful computer than when i was using 2004(core 2 duo processors; 4 gig's of ddr3 ram). and i never used special sceneries in 2004. but i did find some more adjusting sliders that i didn't find before. so that has helped. also, i finally got a key code, and am downloading the acceleration pack as we speak. now, should i delete sp1 and sp2 before adding the acceleration pack?
i am also thinking about getting the traffic package. does anyone have that, and if so, what is your opinion of it?
thanks!

i finally got a key code, and am downloading the acceleration pack as we speak. 

I wasn't aware you could download Acceleration. Not legally anyway.