Wish me luck!

[hhomebrewer]

Installing FS2004 with oodles of add-on scenery on a brand-new-today install of Windows 7 Pro. Gonna do it right now. I am praying all goes well. I am back on my big computer which took a dump in November. It had XP on it then. It needed a new hard drive and we expected motherboard failure at the time, so my computer guru said I should do a new OS, too. I've been using a small, ancient (May 2005) emachines with a 4000+ chip, 3Gb of 400MHZ RAM and an 8600GTS video card. Such torture! Such agony! It's good to be back on this one with it's OS upgrade-- and I went from 4Gb to 6Gb RAM. I'm lovin' it!

[hhomebrewer]

Beyond horrific! It looks like the runway is surrounded by a lake and the hills around the airport have no detail at all. I will take some screens and put them up. I hope I do not have to reinstall all this stuff. It takes ages...

[hhomebrewer]

I have SLI enabled. Should I disable it?

[hhomebrewer]

Well, thank you for all your help...

[ShaneG_old]

Installing FS2004 with oodles of add-on scenery

What did it look like before you added the "oodles" of add-on scenery?

Most scenery problems are caused by add-on conflicts, or improper installation of some type.

Knowing what, when, and how you installed, and what settings you have things at, will be essential to figuring this out.

Also, not many here are running Win7 & FS9, so there may indeed be some unforeseen or as yet unknown problems with that combination that may come to light soon.

SLI is useless for FS9 & FSX.

[hhomebrewer]

Installing FS2004 with oodles of add-on scenery

What did it look like before you added the "oodles" of add-on scenery?

Most scenery problems are caused by add-on conflicts, or improper installation of some type.

Knowing what, when, and how you installed, and what settings you have things at, will be essential to figuring this out.

Also, not many here are running Win7 & FS9, so there may indeed be some unforeseen or as yet unknown problems with that combination that may come to light soon.

SLI is useless for FS9 & FSX.

Never had it on with 7. I had similar problems with an install of FSX (I think it was FSX) on XP, SP3. I fiddled with the anti-aliasing, the filtering, the settings-- anything I could figger. I eventually had to re-install everything-- even my add-on sceneries. That got it right, and it was fabulous-- as close to photographic as I have ever seen on this machine.

Then this machine went completely to hell in an Acronis back-up. Not going to go into it here, but the whole thing went south-- way, way south. Set it aside for about four months until just the other day when my computer guru put 7 on it.

I was beyond excited to put FS9 back on with a 50% increase in RAM. I was flyin' high, wide and handsome, dreamin' about the speed increases from the latest OS and the amped-up RAM. But it was a disaster. It looks like something out of 1990-- blocky, checkerboard-like, crazy colors where they should not be-- it was a total disappointment. I am now faced with having to wipe it all and re-install. It takes forever. I am not possessed of the heart to do it tonight. I think I'll go reload some ammo instead...

My add-ons are FSGenesis for the whole USA and hi-def singles for interesting areas like the Grand Canyon and the Rockies, and abacus World Extreme Landscape for the rest of the world. I know these work-- had 'em on several computers in the past. But never with 7...

[ShaneG_old]

My first suggestion for your reinstall would be not to put things in the default location (C:/program files/...)

I know Vista sometimes had real issues with allowing addon scenery to work properly when FS was installed in the default location, and since Win7 is just Vista with the BS removed, it may have the same underlying problem. 

You are correct in that it should be looking way better than it did, but being that FS9 is now 2 OSs old, there may also be some unknown graphics driver conflicts, or such.

The first thing you could try before a reinstall, is to delete the FS9.cfg (not sure where that is on Win7) and set everything back to it's default settings.  If that doesn't do it, then I'd definitely start with a clean slate.

Install FS9 to it's own folder, NOT in C:/Program Files, and then test it to see if bone stock looks OK, and then add and test each Addon one at a time, also to a custom directory folder, and make sure that each is fine, and not causing any problems.

[hhomebrewer]

Thank you for the suggestions, Shane. If I knew anything about this OS, I'd jump right into it. But I'm having lots of trouble with it. I spent half an hour last night trying to post a picture to another website using hotchyx.com as the host. I had to reduce the picture in size by quite a bit, so I had to use VSO Image Resizer to do it. Every time I wanted to put in the values to reduce the picture under VSO, the window from Pictures would close. I like to have a folder right on my Desktop from which to choose the pictures I post and downsize. XP allows this with great ease. 7 does not. It seems to want to do things its way-- like a mac-- not my way, like XP. I will not go back to XP because I paid $140 for 7 Pro, so I will learn to use it. Everybody who has it seems to love it. I am not so enamored, but there is no going back now.

[WingZ]

hotchyx.com eh?
Well, as the thread title suggests...

[hhomebrewer]

hotchyx.com eh?
Well, as the thread title suggests...

It's a hosting site that requires no registration and usernames and all the crap that slows down posting a picture. Just browse it into their site, upload, capture the URL and paste it into your post. I can put up a picture in about 60 seconds. Love it!

[fulanito_uk]

I have windows 7 ultimate and fs9 (also with loads of add-ons) works perfectly... so it has to be something with in the game... as mentioned a conflict?

[microlight]

I'm taking delivery of a new Vaio laptop tomorrow to replace my trusty old HP running XP Pro, on which I've run FS9 on the move for the last couple of years. I'm not expecting improved graphics, just an improvement in speed.

The Vaio will have Windows 7, so I plan to install FS9 outside the 'Program Files' beartrap, so hopefully everything will go smoothly.

[fulanito_uk]

I just installed it stright in... as per XP and had no problems at all....